Top 10s of 2017: Games, Movies, Music, & TV
Blah blah blah 2017 was an endless heartbreaking spiral of bullshit blah blah blah misery and constant fear every time I read the news blah blah blah being slowly suffocated by the weight of my own responsibilities blah blah blah Donald Trump feels two steps away from each and every one of my thoughts like a parasite of the mind blah blah blah Twitter makes me feel empty so I make an active effort not to go on it anymore blah blah blah blah blah every top ten article I’ve read this year shares the sentiment blah blah blah blah blah.
So how were the movies? How was the television? How were the video games? How was the music? Pretty good, actually!
It was far from perfect, mind you. The ratio of “things I want to go bother all of my friends into experiencing” to “things I would only recommend but not push too hard for” was tipped a little more towards the latter in most of the mediums. However, I also feel like there was less I outright hated. Art wise, while last year’s highs were pretty high, its lows were pretty damn low (fucking Suicide Squad and Hacksaw Ridge) whereas this year, there are only one or two things across all mediums I can think of that I hated with any particular passion.
In other words, this was a “very good, but not great” year.
That said, there was plenty to dig, so let’s get to arbitrarily ranking, shall we? Like last year, I made a big list of stuff I liked for each category, the bar of entry for which was intentionally low as to spread the love. I chose ten from each, and put everything else in the honorable mentions. Also, the order in which these lists appear is also a ranked order of how I think they did this year. That’s about it. Let us now list.
(Author's incompetency warning: I wrote the movie list and did the editing for the whole article whilst incredibly sick. Thus this one's coming in a little hot. Expect shittier than usual syntax and typos and all that goods stuff. I'm just as eager to forget about 2017 as you are, so I chose getting it out over not making it a typo filled mess. Sorry. Also, this article should be four posts, but it isn't because laziness. It's long. Feel free to scroll around. Again, sorry.)
SPOILER WARNINGS FOR EVERYTHING!
Movies
One of the reasons I like top ten lists is because there’s a certain amount of positivity built into the concept, and I want to keep that spirit alive in this article. That said, this is the third time I’ve tried writing an introduction for the movie section because I’m basically all shrugs about the films this year as a whole, save for what’s on this list. Granted, some of this has to do with reflecting on the tidal wave of bullshit the men of Hollywood have inflicted upon the art I love. But even if Harvey Weinstein kept it in his pants, I'm just not particularly passionate about the films this year. So I’m going to write a thing or two I liked about this year, then wrap around to the list in the hopes that you won’t notice.
Hey, those Marvel movies are actually getting pretty good, huh? I mean, yes, a Marvel movie is still a Marvel movie, and what that means to you depends on your tastes. But I was never really bothered by the frequency of the Marvel films so much as the homogenization of them. They weren’t literally all the same movie, but they sure felt like it. Now, however, we have a great high school comedy in the form of Spider-Man: Homecoming and an awesome pulpy ‘70s/‘80s sci-fi film in Thor: Ragnarok and a rated R drama that made this list that we'll talk about soon enough. It’s nice to see Marvel getting comfortable with experimentation.
This was also a year of challenge, of new voices either making a name for themselves or refining their work, and of established filmmakers going in new directions. I may not be as enthusiastic about this list as I was (and still am) for last year’s, but I find myself just as inspired in the simple knowledge that nobody wanted to play it safe.
There’s a rebellious spirit in films this year that I not only hope continues into next year, but also bleeds into other aspects of our lives.
So hey, maybe it wasn’t as bad a year for films as I thought.
Runner-Up: Get Out
Full disclosure: I read the script a little under a month before the movie came out, thus I probably didn't have the same experience seeing it as you did.
That said, I really wish I was as over-the-moon about it as many people have been. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great film. Judging by the Metacritic thing, it’s the most critically beloved movie of the year, a distinction it deserves, and the financial success of Get Out fills my heart with endless unimaginable joy both as an aspiring filmmaker and a basic human being.
That said, it is on these "best of" lists that we must split the smallest of hairs, and my biggest problem with Get Out is protagonist Chris Washington.
Who is Chris? He’s a photographer, the chosen profession of many many protagonists in the indie scene and countless indie scripts. He has a white girlfriend, which puts him in relatable situations when it comes to the heartbreakingly long list of intricacies and nuances to work around when it comes to race relations in America. He is, like everybody else on the planet, afraid when put in danger.
But what does he want? What does he care about? What sets him apart, other than being played by Daniel Kaluuya, who’s an incredible actor that more than deserves to be a household name? He feels responsible for his mother’s death, but backstory can only do so much. We connect with the people on the screen by watching them do things, not by them telling us about what happened to them. So other than some exposition, I don’t know.
Granted, I think part of the point of Chris is to be somewhat of a blank slate to project yourself onto, and for many people I’m sure that’s enough. But it wasn’t for me, despite how much I wish that wasn’t the case, and I felt like I was watching a vehicle for the plot as opposed to an actual nuanced human being. And even then, if you lay the story out into its bare beats, you’ll find that Chris doesn’t actually do as much as you think he does. (In the first two acts, at least.)
Again, it’s a great movie. But it’s a movie I appreciate more on an intellectual level than on an emotional one, and I like movies that make me feel things. And at the end of the day, I’m of the opinion that the best kind of negative criticism you can give is that you wanted more.
10. Kedi
I’m allergic to cats. Not deadly allergic. All that happens is that my nose gets runny and I get a little wheezy, but it’s nothing a well timed allergy pill can’t handle. This is to say that I have somewhat of a bias against cats. I don’t hate them. In fact, I would almost assuredly own one if I weren’t allergic. I just prefer not to be near them. Also, while it’s not possible for the internet to overhype cats, the internet has kind of overhyped cats. It’s not your fault, my lovely cat owners. It’s just… you know.
And so it’s for those admittedly dumb reasons that I thought I was going to hate Kedi, a documentary about the thousands of stray cats that roam the streets of Istanbul. Much to the extreme disservice of director Ceyda Torun, I thought it was basically going to be Youtube Cat Video: The Movie. (Hell, it was even put out by Youtube Red.) It might’ve had some higher production values than someone filming their cat on their phone, but that would be about it.
Kedi, as it turns out, is one the most quietly heartwarming films I saw this year.
At the end of the day, it’s less about the cats and more about the city’s relationship with them. It’s about how ingrained they are in Istanbul’s past, and how they are part of what makes the city unique. It’s about the weird little friendships that develop between any one of the cats and, say, a local fisherman or a store owner. As a friend of mine put in at a party, albeit in humorously reductive manner, it’s about people “waxing existential while playing with cats.”
There’s a scene around halfway through the documentary where the director is interviewing a man at a flea market when they’re both interrupted by somebody holding a particularly tiny injured kitten. It’s explained that the kitten was slammed to the ground by an older cat. The man wonders if the kitten is dead, but once it shows some sort of life, he immediately takes the kitten to a vet.
This isn’t his kitten, and he’s never met it before. Yet, everything stops because he has to take care of it. There’s something about that kind of decency that gets to me, partially because I’m not quite sure I’m capable of doing the same if someone handed me an injured cat, and partially because I don’t think I live in a place where this kind of behavior is encouraged.
All this, combined with the beauty of Istanbul, made for me a rather warm experience. In 2017, it’s exactly what I needed. A movie about being kind.
9. Logan
I went into Logan at my most unnecessarily cynical. I really only knew two things about it: That a bunch of my friends were describing it as an “anti-superhero movie” and that it was a Wolverine movie. Neither of these were selling points for me. The last time I had seen a supposed deconstruction of superhero movies was Watchmen, and what with that being the first graphic novel I ever read, my thoughts on the film adaptation were, let’s just say… negative. And as far as it being a Wolverine movie, just watch either of the previous two films and you’ll know all you need to.
And I knew about the critical praise as well. However, I dismissed it in my head as “Critics like it because it doesn’t feel as off the assembly line as most of the Marvel movies, and they mistake that for value.” I have no idea why I thought this, but I did.
So I went to see it not expecting much. I left pinching myself that it was allowed to exist.
There’s plenty to talk about when it comes to Logan. The direction. The storytelling. The acting. The action sequences. The brutality. But the element I want to focus on is the finality.
Logan takes place in something resembling a post-apocalypse. No world ending cataclysm happened and everyone still lives a normal life minus the self-driving trucks. However, no new mutants have been born in decades and powerful telekinetic Charles Xavier, now suffering from Alzheimers, accidentally killed most of the X-Men. No evil villain succeeded in any evil plan, but it still feels like end times. We’re then introduced to Laura, a little mutant girl created in a lab using Logan’s DNA.
Given the death of all of the mutants that have come before Logan, and the introduction of the new generation that wasn’t supposed to exist, it isn’t particularly hard to guess how this film is going to end.
But that’s entirely the point. Logan, once all is said and done, is a film about endings, a rare thing to find in a superhero franchise film where things have to stay alive forever. It’s about defining your legacy, and choosing whether to be remembered as a drunken limo driver in Texas or a guardian. It’s about how though you may want to do nothing but lay down and die, particularly when the world you live in has gone to shit, you have to keep fighting, especially when others depend on you. (A particularly stirring message in 2017.)
I just hope Marvel can restrain itself from making another Wolverine movie. Or at least one with Hugh Jackman.
8. Phantom Thread
I’ve taken it for granted for a long time now that most of my favorite artists are probably assholes. Of course this doesn’t justify any heinous or harmful behavior said artist may have committed. I mean that more in regards to their general dispositions and personalities. In other words, a lot of them probably aren’t nice. Of course, you can be brilliant and kind at the same time, but if they were capable of interacting with others the way that normal people do, maybe they wouldn't be able to create the art we love so much.
Reynolds Woodcock, a famous dressmaker in London in the 1950s, and an apparently gifted one (I wouldn't know), is an asshole. Again, he’s not an an asshole in the predatory sense of the word. He’s an asshole in the sense that he’s frequently rude and judgmental, and when it comes to relationships, women come, they serve as his muse, they lose their effect on him, and his sister and consigliere Cyril shows them the door.
Reynolds is capable of producing beauty, but part of his makeup is that he also puts out hurt. As such, he has developed a tightly wound and controlled way of life, and everybody he surrounds himself with is there to make sure this way of life is never disrupted. That way, the dresses will keep coming forever.
Enter Alma Elson, an immigrant waitress he meets in a restaurant in the countryside. (I don’t believe that where she’s from is ever explicitly said out loud. For what it’s worth, the actress, Vicky Krieps, is from Luxembourg. Also, she does an incredible job and deserves some Oscars love, if only for being able to hold a scene on her own with Daniel-Day Lewis.) Alma isn’t like the other women who have come and gone in his life. It’s not just that she’s “strong-willed,” the phrase that I’ve seen thrown around in a lot of reviews and summaries of Phantom Thread. It’s that, if you ask me, she likes taking Reynolds’s asshole behavior just as much as he likes giving it out.
And so evolves a loving relationship built upon the mutual desire to inflict pain on each other. Sometimes quite literally. (No, there’s no physical violence.) Alma and Reynolds find the best in each other. She learns to share his love of his dresses, and becomes just as protective of them as he is. He learns to accept a little more annoyance and inconvenience in his life, which for him is a pretty big deal.
However, they also find the absolute worst in each other as well. She disrupts his ability to create his art, often intentionally. He has the uncanny ability to be as uncaring and unresponsive to her displays of kindness as humanly possible. They’re great for each other. They’re horrible for each other. And it’s just as exciting as it is depressing.
With all that said, here's the reason why this movie hasn't left my mind: If this story took place in another time with the kind of people who were capable of being better to each other, I don’t know if I would have found it as meaningful. And that doesn’t make me feel comfortable with myself. At all.
7. The Florida Project
This might be a problem unique to me, but there are a lot of people in my various social media feeds who’ve been calling The Florida Project "depressing." They’re not wrong, especially when it comes to the back half of the film in which things start to fall apart. But I’m not as quick to paint The Florida Project in such broad strokes.
In the first scene after the opening credits, Moonee, our protagonist, her friend Scooty, and their friend Dicky go to a different motel than the one they live in order to spit on some cars. While they’re spitting on said cars, they negotiate a perpetually changing points system where the spitter is awarded X number of points depending on which part of the car they hit. (A debate I had on several million occasions as a little kid.) Eventually the owner of the car, a mother we spend a lot more time with as the story progresses, comes out to yell at them, at which point Dicky yells, “GO HOME, RATCHET BITCH!”
Everyone in my theater, including myself, started laughing their asses off. Sure, part of that must’ve been the good ol’ fashioned “little kid swearing and using contemporary slang” joke. But it had more to do with how accurately the scene nails pre-adolescent swearing and mischief.
This is a smaller example of what’s so special about the The Florida Project, which is that it does a better job than possibly any movie that’s come before it of capturing the bubble of childhood innocence before you really understand the exact circumstances of where you live and what it means. When you have such limited exposure to the world that it never occurs to you that there’s something wrong with living in a motel near Disney World with… let’s just say not the best of company. You play with your friends and get into trouble just like normal kids, and hell, the decent man who runs the motel may watch out for you when he can. But it simply doesn’t register with you that something’s wrong.
And when we’re in that bubble, I think the movie’s a lot of fun. We watch the kids make new friends and revel in the joy that is childhood while getting into increasingly dumb shenanigans, even by little kid standards. We know the illusion can’t last forever, but the joy is so radiant in the moment that there were times when I forgot the inevitable was bound to happen.
But the inevitable does happen, and yes, watching Moonee slowly suffer the consequences of her mother’s actions, as well as her own, is as heartbreaking as you might think it is. However, one of the better creative decisions that bolsters The Florida Project is that it doesn’t all come crashing down at once. It’s a slow descent. One that takes up the entire back half of the movie. (It’s actually Moonee that starts it, but that’s sort of beside the point.) We’re then left to argue which is worse.
So yes, The Florida Project is depressing. But that’s only because the highs are as high as the lows are low. When we say “The Florida Project is sad,” we’re really only talking about half the movie. Not the part that's special. But then again, I'm not a parent.
6. The Lost City of Z
Another year has come and gone, and once again, I’m writing about white men intruding in the Amazon rainforest in search of a payday. However, unlike Embrace of the Serpent, The Lost City of Z is told from the white man’s perspective, and instead of exploring the consequences of his faffing about in a world where he doesn’t belong, it’s about what drives him there in the first place.
It’s 1905. Percy Fawcett is a young English officer married to a beautiful wife and making his way up the ranks in the British military. He’s the pure embodiment of the old time masculinity of the early 1900s, and Charlie Hunnam does a great job imbuing him with a sense of ruggedness that one would assume would buy you some respect, even in the upper echelons of society. Sadly, he’s the son of a disgraced alcoholic, and thus his name means less than nothing. So how do you redeem yourself for circumstances beyond your control but you have to anyway because English society was totally fucked? You agree to lead an expedition to settle a border dispute between Bolivia and Brazil, of course!
So off he goes, leaving his family behind. He meets Harry Costin, who’ll remain a lifelong friend. (Played by Robert Pattinson, in one of his two career defining roles of 2017. We’ll be talking about the second one soon enough.) Together, they brave the Amazon jungle and do their duty. Along the way, Percy hears of a city. It’s said that this city is covered in gold, and it has technology beyond anything they’ve ever seen, even in London. He dismisses the existence of this city at first, but then he finds some circumstantial evidence that indicates that this city may actually exist.
Finding this place immediately consumes Percy’s mind, and though it’s partially out of the dream of further wealth, it’s also the promise of a place where his name wouldn’t need redeeming. A place that so outshines London that he could forgot about the English upper crust forever. Finding the city, which he calls “Z,” becomes his dream.
So what gets in the way of his dream? The same bullshit that gets in the way of everyone’s dreams. Years later he returns with the sole purpose of finding Z, accompanied by respected biologist James Murray. Murray, as he proves himself over and over again, is an incompetent fuck up who costs Percy not only his expedition, but his seat on the Royal Geographical Society. He wants to go back, but WWI breaks out, and he has to go to the trenches. He makes it out of the hellhole, and finally earns the respect of his son. But he still dreams of Z.
It’ll be decades before he gets to go again, but just like his father beforehand, his obsession may lead to the ruin of his son and the destruction of an entire way of life.
The Lost City of Z feels like an old Hollywood film, only at the end of the day, the white man doesn’t get what he wants. Instead, he’s consumed by an obsession with a place that may not exist. The Lost City of Z may not seem as anti-colonization as Embrace of the Serpent, but it does a great job showing us how it’s men like Percy who are the ultimate parasites. His whole life became dedicated to one singular purpose. Who or what gets hurt in the process, or what happens to himself for that matter, is of no concern.
5. mother!
Alright, look. If you’ve seen mother!, chances are you’ve already formed a strong opinion about it, and whether or not that opinion is negative or positive, you aren’t going to be talked out of it. That's just the kind of movie mother! is. If you haven’t seen it, then based on the narrative around its audience reception, you may have reason to believe that it’s a disaster.
So rather than trying to convince you that this movie is brilliant (unless you’re like me and you already believe this to be the case), I am simply going to recall my own experience seeing it and what I thought it was about, then you can go back to hating this movie until your heart is content. Do what you wanna. People have wrong opinions all the time. #Passiveaggressivechildishnessisfun
I saw mother! in a theater on September 15th, it’s opening day in Los Angeles. I remember that detail because I’m a big Aronofsky fan, and mother! was one of the movies I was looking forward to the most in 2017.
Three opinions formed in my head as I sat in the theater and watched mother! The first one was, “Holy shit does Darren Aronofsky know how to move a camera.” Yes, this is a skill he’s proven many times before, given that he’s made seven films now, and all look completely different from one another not just in terms of visual aesthetic, but how he moves his camera to best enhance the story he’s trying to tell. (In other words, The Wrestler, a slower, more elegant movie in his filmography, does not have the frenetic wobbles and shakes of, say, Requiem for a Dream.)
However, what impressed me the most with Aronofsky’s camera in mother! is how much tension and fear he’s able to communicate with how he follows Jennifer Lawrence and how he maneuvers the layout of the house. (A layout which, by the way, I’m pretty sure makes less and less architectural sense the more the movie goes on. In a Shining like way.) There were scenes where I had no narrative reason to be afraid, but I was terrified just because of how the camera crept on that lightbulb or on a figure in the background.
The second opinion was that this was about being married to an artist. Jennifer Lawrence is married to Javier Bardem, a famous poet suffering from writer’s block. They live in a remote house they built to live in together, and his most prized possession is a crystal. He lets in a lodger. Then his wife. They break the crystal, and Javier feels miserable. Before he can sink too low, however, he publishes a new poem and… let’s just say more and more people show up. Jennifer, who just wanted a life alone with Javier, finds her whole existence torn down while Javier gives his adoring fans everything he has. Access to their lives, all of their things, and, eventually, their child. Everything. So she blows the house up, and he remains unscathed, only to pull a crystal out of her chest and restart the cycle with some other woman. If there isn’t a better metaphor, albeit an unsubtle one, for being married to an artist, I don’t know what it is.
Yes, the bible and the mother nature stuff was there, but those wasn’t the parts I personally found interesting. And yes, in hindsight, all that stuff was ridiculously on the nose, particularly when you have the cast and the film’s own writer and director outright saying all this stuff in the press. Still, art is art, and it’s the viewer’s job to prescribe meaning and discover why they care.
Which leads me to opinion three: “This movie is fucking insane!”
Simply put, this movie has an energy to it that I found infectious. I was completely sucked in by the sheer force of it, and while I understand that a lot of people feel differently, this is one of the movies I felt the most in 2017. It didn’t always make me feel good. More overwhelmed than anything, really. But I’ll never forget it.
4. Dunkirk
There’s a theme running through this list (and the others) that you may have picked up on, and that is expectation verses execution. Or to put it in an even simpler way, “I went into it thinking it was going to be shit, then it turned out not to be shit, and my surprise over how not shit it is enhanced my enjoyment of the film.”
I was not expecting Dunkirk to be shitty. Christopher Nolan is too talented a filmmaker to make anything completely without merit, even when he’s at his worst. (I am more willing to be critical of Nolan than I lot of people, but I’ll never deny his talents and his track record is better than most.) I was, however, expecting another awards friendly war movie. I was expecting dramatic monologues and dying in each other’s arms and all the cheap tricks war movies deploy come Oscar season. In fact, I had a pretty fun time annoying my friends by putting on my bad English accent and growling, “We’re going to Dunkiiiiiiiirk” in a needlessly gravely voice.
In other words, I was expecting something more akin to Saving Private Ryan, an amazing film to be sure, but also one that relies on sentimentality more than it should. What I got instead was something, at least in my opinion, more powerful. It’s not dramatic monologues or orchestra swellings or a bunch of guys talking about their wives the night before some of them inevitably die.
In the end, it’s just a bunch of scared kids on a beach, the citizens who rescue them, and the pilots who help them along the way. That's it. And that’s why it works.
And I understand that if you merely strip Dunkirk down to it’s bare minimums like that, it might seem disingenuous to its unique structure or the astounding visuals or some of the best work Hans Zimmer has produced so far in his career. And maybe it is. But stripping it down seems appropriate to me because this is the most stripped down film Nolan’s made so far. In the past, I’ve said Nolan uses a lot of exposition. Dunkirk barely has any. I’ve also said his dialogue is not his best attribute as a filmmaker. Dunkirk barely has any of that either. It’s like Nolan realized what he does best, visual storytelling, and went all in.
As a result, I think this is Nolan’s best film. I would say that this is the kind of film I want him to make for now on, but I also want him to keep surprising me. Just like he always does.
3. Good Time
Before writing this, I took a look at last year’s list. Surprisingly enough, I’m still pretty happy with it. (Less so with the prose, but that’ll be true with every top ten list I write from here until the end of time.) It’s a damn fine crop of films if I may say so myself. However, I had a realization while looking at that list. Embrace of the Serpent is absolutely the best film on it, and it had the bigger emotional impact for me than any film on that list. But it’s not the one I’m the most enthusiastic about. It was not the movie that made me the most excited about films in general, and at no point did I text all my fellow film buff friends that they had to see it. That honor, in all honesty, would probably go to Green Room.
I could give you a few reasons why. It’s style. The story. The brutal violence inflicted on the nazis. But if I had to sum it up, there’s just an energy to Green Room that’s hard to shake. It's a very simple premise executed as effectively as humanly possible. It may not have been the most important or emotionally stirring experience. But it’s one I felt in my guts.
Good Time was that movie for me in 2017. But whereas Green Room takes the visceral feel of punk rock and combines it with stomach churning violence to create a sense of dread and raw tension, Good Time feels like you’ve been up for days doing coke with strangers, and suddenly you’re thrown into a thriller and you’re expected to make good decisions.
The premise of Good Time, like Green Room, is pretty simple. Connie Nikas, played by Robert Pattinson in a performance that’ll never make me think about Twilight ever again, brings his mentally handicapped brother Nick on a bank robbery. Things don’t go smooth, Nick gets arrested, and Connie has to come up with ten grand as quickly as possible in order to bail him out.
What happens next is a series of escalating decisions so jaw-droppingly poor that it’ll make your head spin.
I do think this is a case of “The less you know going into it, the better.” (The trailer even has some pretty heavy spoilers in it.) I’ll just stop at this: There have been two times in my life where I’ve heard my father feel something so strongly while seeing a movie in a theater that it made him say something out loud. (Yes, I saw Good Time in a theater with my dad.) The first time was a saddened “Oh no” at the reveal of what happened to Casey Affleck’s children in Manchester by the Sea. The second time was when Ray, Connie’s new partner-in-crime (thanks to the increasingly ridiculous circumstances of the movie), pours all that acid down the unconscious security guard’s throat.
2. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
I’m a sucker for a good revenge story. True, it can be a cheap gimmick and plenty of revenge stories quickly enter the realm of the tasteless. However, I like my plot married with my character motivation. I like stories where characters do things not because they have to, but because they want to. Revenge can be cheap, but done correctly, it ties emotion into every decision the character makes. “You wronged me, and I’m doing this to you because I’m hurt.”
However, it’s the morality of revenge that fascinates me the most, and I want my revenge stories to attempt to look inwards and question whether or not bloody vengeance is justified. I said I liked a good revenge story. What I should’ve said was “I’m a sucker for a good revenge tragedy.” Gorboduc and what have yous.
Three Billboards is, to me, a revenge tragedy. It’s not a revenge tragedy in the sense that a horrible act was committed, then another horrible act was committed as a response to the first horrible act and now a third horrible act has to happen in order for the person who committed the second horrible act to suffer any consequences. It’s a revenge tragedy in the sense that it follows a wave of morally questionable decisions in a flood that’s been building for years.
The police force of Ebbing, Missouri was already staffed with incompetents, particularly Officer Dixon who, at his core, is a rotten racist piece of shit. There isn’t a whole lot he hasn’t been accused of, and his behavior has (rightfully) colored the whole department poorly, despite the best intentions of the now ailing Chief Willoughby. As if this weren’t enough, a young woman was brutally raped and murdered in the town, and they failed to solve the crime. Her mother Mildred is furious. So she takes out the titular three billboards: “RAPED WHILE DYING” “AND STILL NO ARRESTS?” “HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?”
There’s a question over whether or not the crime could’ve ever been solved in the first place. However, though Mildred’s desire for justice is certainly real, I don’t think it’s what’s really motivating her decision making. I think at the heart of everything, Mildred is in pain, and she’s looking to inflict it onto others. It doesn’t really matter how. So she does so, only to cause more suffering herself and stoke the fire of everybody’s else misery. Dixon’s. Willoughby’s. Everyone’s.
Some of these people have a reason for hurt, and some are just angry because they’re too dumb to know otherwise and they live in a country that brings out the worst in themselves. So they do horrible things to themselves and each other, and much like Good Time, one bad choice leads to the next. But these decisions don't form a straight line. Instead, they create ripples that crush everyone in their path.
The movie ends with Mildred and Dixon, after having suffered much more than they did in the beginning of the film, in a car on their way to murder someone. A lot of people have read this scene as the film finding sympathy with a racist cop, but I don’t think that what the film finds at the end with Dixon can reasonably be called "sympathy." All that’s merely being pointed out is that the motivations behind a supposedly righteous act of violence and the ones behind a dumb redneck cop beating a man in the street have more in common than you’d like to think because violence and revenge aren't rational.
You’re in a car and you're on your way to murder another human being. In the end, the “why” of it doesn’t really matter because the consequences will be the same no matter what. All that follows is more grief and suffering for everyone.
1. Call Me By Your Name
The Perlman family spend their summers in a beautiful home in the beautiful Italian country side. (A home for which I would do heinous things to own myself.) Mr. Perlman, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who’s one of those actors I am literally always happy to see, is an art history professor, and part of his job is to think of beautiful things to say about beautiful statues and beautiful paintings. Annella Perlman, Mr. Perlman’s beautiful wife (played by the Amira Caesar), whom if I remember correctly also has some sort of academic background, presumably in something beautiful, tends to the beautiful house and does whatever she can to fill her days with beauty. Finally, there’s Elio, our seventeen year old protagonist played by Timothée Chalamet (who gives a beautiful performance), spends his days reading beautiful books, playing beautiful music, and commingling with the other European youths.
In the first scene of this beautiful film, a post graduate student named Oliver comes to stay with the Perlmans and assist Mr. Perlman with his work. Elio can see immediately that Oliver is beautiful. Oliver thinks the same of Elio, but neither outright say it out loud. (In fact, Elio is even a little repulsed by Oliver’s personality at first.) Yet they go about their beautiful lives in this beautiful place, dancing to beautiful pop music at night and sleeping with beautiful Italian women. But the two become obsessed with one another, and over the beautiful images the film bathes us in and the beautiful blend of classical music selections and original beautiful Sufjan Stevens songs, the two begin a beautiful love affair.
Then it ends. It doesn’t end in a particularly dramatic fashion or a scandal, but it ends nonetheless, leaving Elio utterly devastated. It is then that Mr. Perlman delivers a stunningly beautiful speech to his son with one clear question in mind: Why can’t heartbreak be beautiful as well? Isn’t the fact that you’re a human being capable of feeling such a wide breath of emotion in and of itself beautiful? How beautiful is it that you can love somebody so much that their mere absence is enough to bring tears to your eyes? How beautiful is it that this love gets to define and teach you?
Call Me By Your Name is my favorite movie of the year because, as you may have guessed, I found it spellbindingly beautiful to the point where I forgot myself and where I was. As I said in the Taylor Swift article, I saw this movie the day of the tax bill vote. It had been hanging over my thoughts in the days leading up, and I knew it was happening that night. But this movie transported me to a different place, a place I yearn to return to the moment Call Me By Your Name comes out for purchasing, and it reminded me that I’m capable of finding something moving, in this day and age, that has little to do with politics. Instead, it’s simply a movie about love and loss, and the beauty both entail.
But until that day comes, I purchased the soundtrack. I bought it right after getting home from seeing the movie, and I’m still listening to it to this day. Particularly this one piano piece played by Andre Laplante.
Though it’s a piece that goes up and down, just like the boat on the ocean in the title, it’s one of the few things in 2017, and the beginning of 2018, that brings me peace. And it works because it makes me think of Call Me By Your Name, and it brings me back there.
Honorable Mentions:
Baby Driver
The Big Sick
Blade Runner 2049
Brigsby Bear
Check It
Coco
Colossal
Columbus
Darkest Hour
Jane
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond
John Wick 2
The Lego Batman Movie
Logan Lucky
Molly’s Game
The Post
A Quiet Passion
The Shape of Water
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Split
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Thor: Ragnarok
War for the Planet of the Apes
Wonder Woman
Will See Someday:
BPM (Beats Per Minute)
The Breadwinner
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Faces Places
It Comes At Night
The Killing of a Sacred Dear
Lady Macbeth
Loveless
Okja
Rat Film
Raw
The Square
I’m sure there’s more I haven’t thought of.
Video Games
It was a bit of an odd year for me, video game wise. A lot of this had to do with the fact that the two primary devices I use to play video games are my MacBook Pro and my PS4, and thus unfortunately I was shut out of a lot of the bigger games I wanted to play this year. (Primarily PUBG and Cuphead.)
But then after the halfway mark of the year, I bit the bullet and finally purchased a Nintendo Switch, and I didn’t put it down for two months. Then I took a break. Then came Super Mario Odyssey, and I pretty much just put it down again. (Needless to say, we’ll be discussing this game shortly.) I was worried about buying the Switch not because I thought it would be an inherently flawed system like the Wii U. I just didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a console only to have it collect dust until an exclusive came out for it that I wanted to play. Glad to see that wasn’t the case.
I’ve been so caught up in my Switch that when it came time to make this list, I realized that I forgot something pretty fundamental: That this whole year was pretty damn great from start to finish. It never felt to me like there was any major dry spells where nothing came out or there was nothing to play. It’s just been incredible all around.
I also feel like games did a substantially better job telling stories than they did last year, and that’s always something to celebrate. It’s telling that the only complaint I have about this year is that I wish I got to play more.
(Apologies for the image sizes here. Phone games have different proportions than those you play on a TV, hence why some of these are tall and most are wide.)
Runner-Up: Monument Valley 2
I didn’t take mobile games seriously until I played Monument Valley. True, I wasn’t actually paying that much attention to the mobile scene and, let’s be honest, mobile games at the time weren’t making a particularly compelling case for themselves. (Flappy Bird anyone?) But it should’ve been obvious that at some point, someone was going to do something truly special with the platform, and soon came Monument Valley.
Now I’ll happily admit that Monument Valley isn’t a particularly challenging puzzle game. (That is if you’re of the opinion that Monument Valley is a puzzle game in the first place, which is debatable.) But for me at least, it isn’t a game about challenge. It’s about the grace in which all of its pieces fit together and the serenity of navigating each area. It’s a game concerned with ethos, and though I can only guess as to what’s going on in the story, the joy it brought me came from its visuals and bending each space to my will to grant Ida passage. (Soundtrack’s pretty great too.)
Monument Valley 2 is even better.
It not only delivers a more narratively satisfying experience with Ro and her daughter, but it also expands upon its beautiful world while also using its impossible architecture to reflect each's inner-journey. A mother is separated from her daughter, and her world turns grey and harsh. A girl slowly becomes a woman, and with this exciting new growth comes beautiful trees and an emphasis on light and color.
But what impressed me the most was the structure.
The first time you play the game, after Ro sends her daughter away, we spend a large chunk of time with Ro as she learns to cope with the grief. It starts grey, but eventually the color returns as she discovers more of herself and learns to find peace. We then spend time with the daughter, whom we watch grow into a woman and learn to reach the same spiritual heights of her mother. Finally, in the last level, they reunite and navigate the world together, just like all the women who have came before them and all that shall come after as well.
Then you replay the game, and you can play these levels in whichever order you want. If you play the beats closer together, you can begin to see how these two journeys mirror each other, and how the process of letting go is similar to the process of growing up.
Monument Valley 2 didn’t make the main list only because I had some more fulfilling experiences this year with other games. But it’s still incredible, and I’m happy to have played it. I hope with all my heart for a third one.
10. A Normal Lost Phone/Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story
Yes, these are two games. But they both came out this year, and they’re both so close in quality, at least to me, that it felt wrong to separate one from the other.
And yes, there’s an inherent moral flaw in the premise of these games, both of which find you navigating a lost phone in order to figure out the story behind said phone’s owner, and A Normal Lost Phone has you double down on that flaw at one point by having you send a picture of the phone’s owner to a stranger on a dating app. However, at the risk of sounding a bit heartless (and condescending to people who did find these elements a bit too problematic), I was aware the entire time that I was playing a work of fiction, and there weren’t any real life consequences for what I was doing. Games are more immersive by nature, and it’s easy for some to project themselves into what they’re doing in the game.
It’s not easy for me. I don’t know why, except for the part where I’m emotionally closed off to an almost laughable extent. The point is that there’s the consequences of going through a stranger’s phone in real life, and then there’s going through a fictional stranger’s phone in a video game, and in my mind, nary the two shall meet. I am wrong. I know that. Don’t go through stranger’s phones. As a matter of fact, don’t go through anyone’s phone. Play these games instead.
Now, though we are in spoiler territory, I do believe these games are best played knowing as little as possible. So in that spirit, I’ll only talk about the first one, A Normal Lost Phone.
Something you need to know about me: I’ve touched on this before, but despite me paying for this here internet space, you should know that I am, at best, a light internet user. Don’t get me wrong, I’m on it everyday. Frequently. More than I should be. But what I mean is that as far the communication side of the internet is concerned, there’s a very fine line in the sand between when I actually engage and when I’m just an observer. I’ll occasionally jump in on a comment section here and there or write an errant tweet to someone, but the internet is still a mostly solitary experience for me.
All of this is to say something simple: I’ve never been on an internet forum before, and I’ve never understood their appeal. That is, until I played A Normal Lost Phone.
Sam, as we learn in the back half of the game, is a closeted transwoman. At some point, she’s turned onto an online forum for LGBT people. In this forum, everyone is incredibly supportive of Sam, and do everything they can to help her, be it simple encouragement or advice on the day-to-day minutia of being trans.
Maybe it’s my lack of forum interactions, or really my lack of anonymous online interactions in general, but I found this section of the game to be one of the most surprisingly moving moments I had with a video game this year. I know this support is fictional support written by writers, and I don’t know how accurate it is to an actual trans forum. But the fact that a space like this for strangers to help each other in this specific a way is incredibly touching to me. Or maybe it reminded me in a year like 2017 that the internet can actually do some good. Or maybe it’s the simple fact that at this point in the game, I had emotional stakes in Sam’s well-being, and I’m happy she found some form of support. I don’t know. It made me smile.
Now, is there a problematic element that Sam being trans is treated as a kind of plot twist? Sure. (In fact, there’s plenty of ethically ambiguous issues to go around with A Normal Lost Phone and its sequel.) But I still found it affective because there’s something deeply sad to me that such a huge element of who this person is has to be buried so deep in her phone. So much effort has clearly went into hiding herself, and I found it heartbreaking that this is the only circumstance in which she could feel comfortable. I can’t even imagine what it’s like with all the other facets of her life.
These games are far from perfect, and I have some specific gripes I have with the handling of certain elements in the second game, Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story. (Mainly that parts of it were a little too much like PSA for me.) But I’m happy I played them.
Also, please read Kate Gray’s article on the second game. It’s a tough read, but it’s necessary and worth it.
9. Pyre
A conversation I remember having at some point:
“Hey, you playing anything?”
“Yeah, this game called Pyre. It’s fucking dope.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a, um… visual novel party based RPG sports game.”
“…huh?”
It may sound to you like Pyre was the result of developer Supergiant picking three random genres out of a hat. (Speaking of which, I have a really good game jam concept…) And you wouldn’t be wrong to doubt that. I even went into this game expecting it to be an overwhelming mess that I would eventually give up on after an hour or two.
Don’t get me wrong, I have all the faith in the world in Supergiant, what with Bastion being as brilliant as it is. (Sadly, I have not played Transistor.) That said, I had little experience with visual novels, I play maybe one RPG every two or so years, and the only sports game that’s grabbed me in the last two generations of game consoles is Rocket League. You can see why I had cause to be skeptical.
You may have been able to tell from its presence on this list, but yes, I think Pyre worked.
There are many individual elements you can point to as to why this is the case. The breathtaking art design. The story. The world building. The characters. The gameplay when it comes down to the sports element of the game, and how well each character plays. I could go on all day. But the real beauty of Pyre is how all these elements weave into one another. You don’t have to get particularly deep into the game to see how much love and thought went into each and every nook and cranny.
Pyre takes place in The Downside, a realm in which the criminals of a land called The Commonwealth are banished to if it is deemed they that committed a serious enough crime. You are found by three other exiles, who soon learn that you have the ability to read, a serious crime in The Commonwealth and a creative choice that immediately put me in the shoes of the protagonist, as I was reading this section as a visual novel. As you possess this rare skill, you can help the exiles conduct The Rites, a sports ritual where two teams compete in a basketball style game where each team has a pyre, and your goal is to take the ball in the center of the court and ram it into their fire until it’s extinguished. (There’s much much more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea.) As you play the Rites, more potential players join your party. Once you win the tournament (so to speak), a player from your team gets to go home to The Commonwealth.
The more you get to know each character, the more you want to send them home. But that also means having to potentially give up the best player on your team, putting you at risk of losing The Rites. So you learn how to play with everyone in you party. But that leads to you becoming attached to them and wanting to send them home. And this process repeats itself over and over as you progress through the story.
It’s this kind of thoughtfulness that made me love Pyre. It’s a similar feeling to the one that came over me when I played Doom last year. This game goes above and beyond to consider the player in every interaction in the game, and that attention to detail and care takes what should be a giant mess and turns it into one of the most satisfying games I played this year.
8. Doki Doki Literature Club!
The less you know about Doki Doki Literature Club!, the better. All you need to know is that it’s free (or you can chip in if you’re feeling generous/are cool), you can download it here, and that despite whatever I chose from the site’s page for the above image, know that this game couldn’t be further from what you think it is. Trust me.
That said, a few non-spoilery thoughts:
1. I’ve seen the vast majority of the Studio Ghibli films, a handful of Satoshi Kon’s work, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and Your Name.
2. I make the previous point to illustrate that I don’t really know much about anime, and there are assuredly some nuances to the subterfuge of Doki Doki Literature Club! that went over my head.
3. We’ve seen a lot of the specific, um, events that happen in the story in other mediums and games before. The difference, however, is that this game executes them so well and so effectively that it honestly didn’t matter to me.
4. Doki Doki Literature Club! is one of the most unsettling games I’ve ever played, and I kind of can’t stop thinking about it.
So yeah, go play it.
7. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
The first time I stealth killed a nazi in Wolfenstein II, I snuck up behind him with a hatchet, chopped off both of his feet, and swung it into his head when he hit the ground. Excessive? Maybe. But it was nazi, so you understand if I didn’t really stop and think of the necessary ethical considerations. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in a year like 2017, this moment felt intimately cathartic.
Then this happened.
Then this happened.
Then this happened.
There are countless other unforgettable moments between all this insanity that easily propel it onto this list, even if I have some significant misgivings about the gameplay, mainly in how needlessly difficult a lot of this game is even on lower difficulty settings and how apparent said difficulty is stacked against you, making every encounter feel more contrived than it should. (We’ve talked about this flaw in other games before.)
And yet, despite how admittedly little I enjoyed the act of playing Wolfenstein II, I think about all the crazy story moments that happened along the way and all the remarkably fleshed out characters that led me down that path, and I can’t help but look back at this game with an almost giddy amount of enthusiasm. I did things in this game that I simply couldn’t believe I was actually doing or seeing, and I told everyone about this game. Even people who don’t play video games. I may be projecting, but I saw that same enthusiasm in their eyes.
If the gameplay were tighter, this would easily be the game of the year. But it wasn’t, and unfortunately, in order to get what I wanted out of Wolfenstein II, I had to turn it all the way down to its easiest difficulty setting and shoot and stab my way through every nazi I saw. Woe is me, right?
6. Horizon: Zero Dawn
I’m someone who gets easily overwhelmed by large open world games. I’ve certainly played my fair share of them, and were I to list my favorite games of all time, I’m sure more than one would be on there. It’s just that I’m also one of those people who feels the need to do everything, and open world games lend themselves to a lot “Hey, let’s cram literally every idea we’ve ever had into our game, and if we leave a few people behind, then fuck ‘em.” (I take these things personally, damnit!)
Thus, every time I start a big open world game, not only do I have more than a few radars up, but also a number in my head, and if the number of things the game wants the player to master and keep track of goes over that number, then I have to have a conversation with myself over whether or not I want to keep playing. This may make me sound like a little bit of a pushover, and you may be right. I just don’t like chores, especially if they’re not fun.
Now, granted, Horizon: Zero Dawn starts you off in a fenced off section of the map, and thus there’s a built in sense of wonder once those huge gates finally open and you’re free to see the rest of the world. However, the primary reason this game succeeds in making me want to see every inch of it is how Horizon: Zero Dawn ties in exploration with the main story of the game.
There are two questions that drive this narrative forward: Where did Aloy, our protagonist, come from and what happened to humanity? You see, in this world, we are no longer the dominant species. That honor goes to the machines, dinosaur like robots that roam the ruins of a post-apocalypse. Humanity has been mostly wiped out, and only a small number remain. Those still alive have formed a primitive society with primitive technology, but we don’t know where we came from, why we’re here, or what happened to make the world the way it is.
Without getting into details, we learn that the answer to the first question is somehow linked with the second, and the game does a stunningly great job building the mystery of what happened to humanity. Thus when I was let off the leash into the open world, I scoured everything in every corner of that map looking for clues. From the snow covered mountains to the jungles to the deserts to the rivers to the cities and communities humanity has built atop the ruins of old. Everything. Along the way, I helped some strangers and hunted some machines, but rarely does an open world game come that retains such a laser sharp focus on the bigger picture: What happened here?
You do get an answer. I think the answer is incredibly satisfying, and apart from a small post-credit scene, Horizon: Zero Dawn goes one step further and actually ends the story, unlike many a big AAA open world game. Assuredly, there will be other games in this world. How they can possibly live up to to this first one on a pure story basis, I don’t know. But I can’t wait to see more.
5. Kimmy
Kimmy is probably the simplest game on this list. A straight up visual novel, it doesn’t offer the grandiose story of post-apocalyptic robot dinosaurs or nazi melting laser guns or, umm… the stuff that happens in Doki Doki Literature Club! However, despite its modesty, I think Kimmy is one of the most deeply rewarding games on this list.
It’s summer in Massachusetts in the late 1960s. You are Dana, a girl living with her family in a suburban neighborhood. One day, you have a chance encounter with a younger girl named Kimmy. There’s something odd about her, but you can’t quite put your finger on what that something is. You get to know her, and soon enough, you become her babysitter. Kimmy has trouble making friends, so you spend the bulk of your time going around the neighborhood and playing games with the other kids.
There are some days where Kimmy seems like a normal kid with an odd quirk or two. Somedays, however, her mood and behavior can be a bit troubling. Eventually, you learn more about her home life, and it becomes abundantly clear why that’s the case. (Don’t worry. It’s bad, but nothing as extreme as what you could be thinking.)
I grew to care about Kimmy, and though I didn’t have a whole lot of agency over what happened in the story and what didn’t, I felt the need to protect her well-being as much as I could. Some of the children in the town have more bully like personalities, and I found myself being more vigilant around them, despite me being powerless to do anything about it. Granted, these are only children. They don’t know better, and to be fair, all have at least some shade of nuance to them and none of them are painted as outright villains. But still, a certain instinct kicked in whenever I sensed that someone was being mean to her.
Then one day, she vanishes. You find out where she went, and though Dana has been your surrogate this whole time, you become acutely aware that she’s just stumbled into something she is in no way equipped to handle. The moment ends, and then she’s gone.
On a surface level, this moment may seem anti-climatic. But for me at least, the important element, and the entire point of the game, is that you made a friend. It's a friendship that doesn't end the way we may want it to, but just like in real life, you don’t go into a friendship expecting to get anything out of it. (Or at least you don’t if you’re an emotionally healthy person.) Friendship is its own reward, and as Kimmy demonstrates, there’s something deeply fulfilling about simply being kind.
Maybe it’s the times we’re in, but I needed something like Kimmy. Something to remind me that decency is painless, and so is the act of reaching out to someone.
4. Super Mario Odyssey
I was sold on this game from the opening few seconds of the reveal trailer. I don’t think I have anything to contribute to the conversation around this game that hasn’t already been said by legions of Nintendo fans before me. Every inch of this game brought me intense amounts of joy and escape. So instead I’ll tell you about the narrative I chose to create while playing this game. It started with the costumes.
Obviously, these costumes are fucking incredible, and on top of my instant enthusiasm for all the outfits, it became clear pretty early on that Super Mario Odyssey was made with past Mario games on its mind. So for some reason I decided in the early levels of the game, that after all of the ordeals that Mario has experienced over the years, he's become a severely depressed hedonist.
Mario says “Fuck it.” Mario is the guy in the trendy nightclub who’s clearly been up for days on end but keeps trying to dance the pain away. There is always cocaine either on Mario’s person or within twenty feet of him. Mario knows there’s no way out. He’s just waiting for his lifestyle to drag him down further, so why not take off your shirt and don your finest captain’s hat as life consumes you?
But nevertheless, he has to defeat Bowser again, so he journeyed on. Eventually, he fought him in the clouds, but he got humiliated and crashed in the Lost Kingdom. He repaired his ship, ventured forward, and once he saw the shimmering metropolis of the gloriously named New Donk City, a thought ran through his head. “I need to get my shit together.”
However, my understanding of Mario has always been that he’s not that smart, so for him, that’s basically just putting on a nice suit.
Now firmly in control of his behavior and his self-destructive impulses, Mario fought Bowser again at his wedding. Only when it was time to possess Bowser with his hat, a side plot that had nothing to do with Mario’s journey towards fulfillment against depression, he saw that he'd done the same amount of damage to Bowser’s psyche as Bowser had done to his. However, instead of learning the ultimate lesson that the only way to break away from a destructive cycle is by changing your behavior, he instead let his triumph get to his head and now lives the rest of his life as an egotistical monster.
Fuck what you heard. There's no happiness in Super Mario Odyssey.
3. Night in the Woods
Possum Springs, a small town somewhere in the middle of America and the setting of Night in the Woods, was suffering. The mines were closing down, the kids were leaving, and the residents were finding life harder. One night, someone went back into the mines and found a bottomless hole. A voice spoke to him from the hole, and he went and preached what the voice had to say: It wanted bodies. The bodies of the young. The poor who don’t “contribute.” Immigrants. “Delinquents.” Those who “won’t be missed.” And so, in the abandoned caves, they formed a cult and started feeding the strange entity the bodies it asked for.
They thought they saw growth again. They think what they have is a result of the young people and immigrants they keep feeding to what they call the “Black Goat.” We’ve spent the whole game up to this revelation understanding perfectly well that this isn’t the case. But yet they believe it, despite everything and everyone around them, so they keep feeding it and feeding it and feeding it.
The only person who begins to understand their worldview is Mae, our protagonist. But she doesn’t understand it because she agrees with their ideology. She understands it because, as it is strongly implied but never said out loud (or at least to my memory), she has a dissociative disorder. She can see everything around her as lifeless as they can. The difference, however, is simple. Mae looks at a person and sees a shape because she has a mental disorder. They look at a person and choose to see nothing.
Put it even simpler: No work of art did a better job summarizing 2017 than Night in the Woods.
However, the reason this game resonates so much with me goes well beyond any depressingly prescient metaphors the story brings to the forefront. It resonated with me because it's so achingly heartfelt. More thought seems to have been put into every word every character says than a lot of entire games I’ve played. Those characters themselves are just as lovingly crafted, and every corner of the town they live in speaks volumes of history and nuance.
It is, simply put, one of the best realized places I’ve ever been to in a video game.
Also, Gregg.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Hi. I’ve never played a Zelda game before until Breath of the Wild.
Part of it was apathy. Part of it was that I was a little kid (or unborn) when the best Zelda games came out, and thus I wasn’t in charge of what games were and were not bought in my house. (That honor belonged to my brother, who didn’t get the Zelda games.) Part of it was that at some point, I developed a weird attitude against fantasy games. Or in other words, I mistakenly convinced myself that “swing your sword into a dragon” was a little too "video game-y" or something like that. (Hey, snobbery's just as good an excuse not to buy something as any.)
So, dear reader who has played a Zelda game, I have some questions for you: Is this what they’ve always been? Has this always been the feeling? I know that not all of you couldn’t have possibly loved this game as much as me or many a game critic. But at it’s absolute best, has this series always been this rapturous?
I ask because it’s been a long long time since I’ve been taken with a game this much. I starved myself because I didn’t want to stop playing it. I blew off writing to keep playing. I would wake up, start playing, and then I would take it out the dock and play it in bed come nightfall. During those shitty moments when I couldn’t play it, I thought about playing it. At no point did I ever tire of it. Then I defeated Ganon, and I was mad at the game for having the indecency to end.
What did I love about this game? The more easily answerable question is what didn’t I love about this game. The stamina meter? Well, here’s the thing: I did the shrines first, so I upgraded my stamina meter early enough so that it was never really a problem. The rain? Yeah, the rain was kind of a bummer. But it either never hit me with the frequency that a lot of people complain about or never at the most inconvenient moments. Inventory? Cooking? Eh. I’ve seen worse. And yes, these problems suck, but nothing’s perfect and in the end, it’s all about what you’re willing to forgive.
And now that I successfully stalled on finding a specific element on Breath of the Wild to talk about, here I am now, and I’m still at a loss. So I’ll talk about two things that I don’t think are getting enough love in other articles about Breath of the Wild. The first being color.
You see, the last open world fantasy game I played was Skyrim, and as much as I enjoyed my time as an Argonian named Corpus Spongiosum (guys, I’m very funny), I can’t say I took any particular joy in looking at that world. The aurora over the sky at night was cool and I liked a few other elements here and there. But it lacked a certain liveliness. You can look at the brightest colors Skyrim has to offer and it would still look drab and grey. Skyrim, the place, feels dead.
The Hyrule of Breath of the Wild feels alive, and part of that has to do with the bright pastel greens of the grasslands and the cool crystal blues of Zora’s Domain and the sun soaked reds of of the cliffs surrounding Gerudo Desert. A lot of video games, particularly ones made by large studios, are quick to shrug off color. Glad the Zelda team knows how well it can define the entire tone of a place, no matter how grand or intimate.
The other element is the music. Again, I haven’t played the old games, so I don’t know what’s recycled and what isn’t. (Or at least other than what I've heard in Smash Bros.) But not only do I love the compositions themselves, but I loved how effectively they’re used. Greater hubs of activity get grander music. When you trek alone through an empty field, there’s a lonely sparseness that only gets a single instrument or two. I know some Zelda fans wanted bombastic orchestral bliss throughout, but power comes in moderation, and I appreciate silence used affectively.
And I could go on. Seemingly forever. And if I don’t stop myself, I will. Breath of the Wild was one of the highlights of my year. I need to play more Zelda games.
1. What Remains of Edith Finch
I have a shitty back.
Alright, that isn’t saying much. A large chunk of the human race have shitty backs, what with the strain we put on ourselves and the rigorous toll we pay for this whole “bipedal” fad. But I’m in my mid-twenties, and already, I’ve had one back problem that I had to go to physical therapy to solve. Essentially, a muscle in my lower back was pinching a nerve somewhere, and whenever I had to stand or walk for more than a few minutes, I’d feel a pain in one of my ass cheeks, my leg would start to go numb, and I wouldn’t be able to stand straight. It wasn’t fun.
My dad has a shitty back.
When he was a child, he was playing on a construction site or something like that, fell a story or two, and landed straight on his back. He somehow made his way home, and his back has given him problems ever since. In fact, during my freshman year of college, he had a five level lumbar fusion, and he wasn’t supposed to have full range of motion ever again. Miraculously, he recovered better than anyone could’ve ever expected, and he can more or less do whatever now. But that may not last forever.
My grandfather had a shitty back. I don’t know any specific stories. I just remember that he had problems. Also, my brother complains about his back sometimes.
I found myself thinking a lot about the shitty backs of the Ginsburgs while playing What Remains of Edith Finch. If you haven’t played this game and all you’ve done is read a review or an article or two, it’ll almost assuredly emphasize that it’s a game about death. And it is. But I would argue that it’s more about being cursed, literally or metaphorically, by your lineage. The idea that if something was wrong with someone from your past, that problem may come up to haunt you, even if it’s only in your thoughts.
My family has shitty backs. The Finch family dies early. Sometimes they die by accident, sometimes by their own hand or a disease or any number of causes, but it’s rare that they live long enough to see old age. So much so that the family believes that they are literally cursed.
Edith wants to understand this supposed curse for reasons that become clear at the end of the game, so she travels back to the Finch House, a bizarre home built on the cliffs over an ocean she just inherited from her newly deceased mother, and goes through each room of every Finch. We play through each member of the family’s death. The deaths, at least by their specific occurrences, aren’t related to each other. But we then begin to question whether or not it’s actually a curse, because it’s either that, or the Finch family is the victim of unbelievably cruel odds. Me being more skepticism prone, I believe the latter.
But I did begin to wonder, and one question led to the next. Were the Finches always doomed? Did they put so much stock in this “curse” mythology that they accidentally sealed their own fates? If they were free from their supposedly poisonous lineage and lived outside the house, would they still be alive?
Lots of games on this list give you an incredible sense of place. Possum Springs from Night in the Woods feels like a small red leaning town in the middle of America. Hyrule’s lush history in Breath of the Wild reveals itself in every corner. When you travel the streets of nazi controlled America in Wolfenstein II, you can see how easily the institutions already in place could’ve succumbed to Hitler’s psychotic ideology.
What Remains of Edith Finch is the first game I’ve ever played that not only gave me a sense of place in the Finch House, but also a sense of family. Odin Finch, Edith’s great great grandfather, moved his family from Norway to America to escape the family curse. He died on the way over, but the fear that drove him across the ocean never left. It just got passed on to his daughter, who passed it on to her kids and so on and so forth.
In the end, it’s not really death itself that gets passed on in the Finch family. It’s the inability to not live your life without it lurking over you because of who you are and who came before you. If you’re a Finch, innocence doesn’t last long. Thus you live your life accordingly. They aren’t literally cursed, but one could understand why it always felt like they were.
And so I played the game in one sitting with my shitty back. The one that I’ve been cursed with. The one I may pass on one day.
Honorable Mentions:
Finding Paradise
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Old Man’s Journey
South Park: The Fractured But Whole
Splatoon 2
SteamWorld Dig 2
Tacoma
Thimbleweed Park
Uncharted: Lost Legacy
Didn't Finish In Time:
Bury Me, My Love
Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
The Sexy Brutale
Will Play Someday:
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Butterfly Soup
Cuphead
Heat Signature
NieR: Automata
PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds
I’m sure there are others.
Music
When you get to the honorable mentions section, you’ll notice a lot of stars next to a lot of album titles. Those stars indicate that they were on a previous version of this top ten list, for you see, it took me several attempts to get a list I was happy with. Music this year was so good that I had to make this list more or less out of attrition.
Now, just so I don’t sound too over-the-moon, again, I like last year’s list a little better. But the quality of each of these albums are so close to one another that this list was basically an exercise in splitting microscopic hairs and wrestling with my own insecurities and hang-ups when it comes to list making. A lot of dumb bullshit, some of which we’ll get into, went into the making of this list. I’m deeply embarrassed by it.
But this is the album list I’m the happiest with primarily because of how strange I think it is. There are albums from genres that I’d never thought in a million years I’d actually include. There are albums on here that came in hot at the very very last minute. There are albums on here from artists that I thought were either well past their prime or incapable of transcending what I thought were their biggest flaws. There were also, simply put, a lot of albums, as you can tell from the honorable mentions list.
I could talk about 2017 music and the process of making this list all day long, but who cares. This list won’t write itself and this article’s getting long. So let’s get to it!
Runner-Up: CunninLynguists, Rose Azura Njano
Please forgive their name. I’ve been a fan long enough at this point that I don’t really see it anymore, and to be fair, there have been much worse names. That said, as far as the gulf between the music you think a group makes based on their name versus the music they actually make, none may be larger than CunninLynguists, a hip hop trio from the south who make some of the richest and most soulful hip hop today, putting a particular emphasis on theme, thesaurus breaking vocabulary, and some of the most left field samples you can possibly imagine.
I listened to this album this year more than most of the albums on this list, and it probably should’ve cracked the top ten on general principal. However, these lists are governed not by logic or fairness, but by my arbitrary bullshit and random whims. So this year, for whatever reason, I decided I wanted to use the top half of the album list to emphasize new experiences and surprises.
In other words, there’s nothing shocking to me about the fact that CunninLynguists put out a great album. Of course they did. That’s what they do.
So I’ll just make a point about this album in the context of their overall discography and then move on. Mainly that I think this is one of their better albums. Not only is it more concise, but it’s a nice break from the sound they’ve created ever since their underground shattering A Piece of Strange.
If you want to boil down that said CunninLynguists sound, basically what Kno, the group’s producer, does is take obscure samples from forgotten prog rock albums and various other genres and use them to create deeply fervent hip hop beats. Almost like hip hop gospel in a strange sort of way. Soulful prog rock-y beats plus incredible writing from the Deacon the Villain, Natti, and Kno and you got yourselves a CunninLynguists albums.
The break from what can only be called the “formula” in the loosest possible usage of the term on Rose Azura Njano is subtle, but makes a big difference if you listen closely. The conceptual conceit of the album is that it’s told from the perspective of a woman with Chromesthesia, a disorder where you see sounds as colors. It is, to summarize, an exploration and celebration of black music. As a result, while there’s still plenty of rock samples, there’s a lot more soul music samples as well, giving Rose Azura Njano a warmer feeling from all the rest of their albums.
I’m going on a little too much about it. I just want to make sure it gets its due. I love this album. I love CunninLynguists.
Favorite Songs: “Violet (The Upper Room)” “Gone” “Mr. Morganfield & Ms. Waters (A-Side)”
10. Aimee Mann, Mental Illness
Hi. This is my first Aimee Mann album. Did you guys know that Aimee Mann is exceptionally good at writing songs?
Of course I was aware of the institution that is Aimee Mann. I've heard her songs sprinkled into various movies and TV shows I’ve watched throughout the years, and just like every other adolescent film nerd, I was on iTunes the second the credits rolled on Magnolia. But I didn't engage further. Why, I don’t know. But the one thing that’s for sure is that I clearly fucked up.
Musically, Mental Illness is an album of acoustic guitars, strings, drums, and pianos. This is not a wild album of blistering rock guitars or any strange production choices to write about. Nothing in the music is going out of its way to shock you, and normally I get weary of albums that only trade in one sound, but this is also an album of incredible intimacy, and it fits. (Also, there was a less reductive way of phrasing “only trade in one sound,” but I failed to find it. Hopefully you get my point.)
All that said, I’m very much a lyrics man, and I very much appreciate a musician with a good turn of phrase. Someone who can pick the right words and put them in the right order to write a song about something as simple as feeling homesick and looking at pictures of a cat you know on Instagram and turn it into a universal song about loneliness. (Specifically, this is in reference to “Goose Snow Cone,” the opening song of the album.)
The strongest example of the evocative nature of Mann’s writing comes in “Patient Zero,” my favorite song on the album. The reason I decided to listen to Mental Illness in the first place was because she performed this song on her episode of WTF, and it became burned into my mind until the part of my brain that makes decisions chocked out the part that worries about money and convinced me to buy the album so that I could listen to it several million times.
The song details a story we’ve heard before. An actor comes out to Los Angeles after having some success.
“They served you champagne like a hero
“When you landed, someone carried your bag
From here on out, you’re patient zero
Smelling ether as they hand you the rag”
Everything’s going great, but then reality hits him. Hollywood, as we’ve spent a large bulk of this year reminding ourselves, is an industry filled to the brim with gaping assholes. He came for success, and of course, they’re are people who want to see him fail. But he can’t see them.
“Hip hip hooray hocus pocus
With some magic you can fly through the air
But when you’re the guy pulling focus
There are people who will wish you weren’t there”
The actor feels something bigger around the corner.
“And in the hills where hope is such a constant companion
Close enough to almost touch the lights of the canyon”
But then, of course, the success he’s been promised and hopes with all of his heart he’ll attain goes to someone else, and Hollywood spits another one out.
“But news filtered over the transom
That a villain ended up with the part
You paid your respects like a ransom
To a moment that was doomed from the start”
Can some obnoxious hipster asshole scream “first world problems” with a sniveling scoff? Sure. Do I project a lot onto these lyrics because I’m an aspiring screenwriter and while I don’t seek Hollywood fame, I do seek success? Absolutely.
But here’s the thing: When I heard this song, I thought it had to have been inspired by a tragedy. Clearly this was written about someone having their dreams shattered, and this is the kind of story that ends with the neighbors calling the cops after smelling something weird and discovering a hanging body in the bedroom. That may sound dramatic, but there’s just something about the words and the composition that I find deeply sad, and something dark had to have been behind them.
Nope. As Mann explains on an episode of the podcast Song Exploder, turns out this song was inspired by meeting Andrew Garfield at a party when he first moved to Hollywood, and he seemed to her to be bewildered by all the glitz. (It was also co-written by Jonathan Coulton, who wrote, amongst many other things, “Still Alive,” the song from the end of Portal.)
There was no tragedy. Just a feeling and the right phrasing. This is what great writers do.
Favorite Songs: “Stuck in the Past” “You Never Loved Me” “Patient Zero”
9. Richard Dawson, Peasant
Some of you may have guessed this, but I frequent The Needle Drop, Anthony Fantano’s music review show on Youtube. One day, he posted a review for this album called Peasant by some guy I’d never heard of named Richard Dawson. (No, not the show host.) The rating was unusually high, and like any video review in which he gives a high score, I stopped watching it so I could listen to the album myself. (I’m very impressionable, I’m embarrassed to say, so I don't want the well poisoned or overhyped.)
The only thing I knew going into it was that it was a folk album. But when Anthony said “folk singer,” my mind immediately turned to something more akin to American folk. In other words, white guy with an acoustic guitar singing about Appalachia (or the English equivalent of Appalachia) or his broken heart. It’ll be nice, but I surely won’t like it nearly as much as much as he does.
But this isn’t American style folk. This is early middle ages folk.
After a horn intro, Peasant begins with the song “Ogre.” I was immediately taken with the instrumentation, Dawson’s voice, and the lyrics. But there’s a verse that sold me on this album with almost lightning speed:
“There comes frightful news from town
Of great evil abound
The heartbroken potter’s idiot boy was snatched from the spelt field
Scouring a fortnight in the hills
All they found, pointing from a sett
A small grey hand”
Every word in that verse is incredible. “Idiot boy” made me think about how hilariously unevolved middle english was, or at least unevolved compared to now when there’s several dozen layers of mental coding you have to parse before even typing out “Hey” on your phone. I also don’t have any logical or factual data to back the following up, but I feel strongly that at least in America, nobody has used the phrase “spelt field” in several hundred years. It's entirely possible that nobody’s ever said “sett” here ever.
But the real part that got me excited was the subject matter. I remember thinking “Holy shit, this is a literally a song about a kid being taken by an ogre. This is fucking amazing!”
Nothing about the subject matter is inherently funny, mind you. Were I middle aged farmer, I too would be heartbroken if my son was taken by any kind of mythical creature. My intent is not to make fun of Richard Dawson or dead children. (Funny how I had to say something similar about the number nine pick in last year’s list as well.) It’s just that this album made me realize something about myself: I am prepared to become extraordinarily enthusiastic about an exceedingly strange work of art depending on how much the artist or the art commits. Peasant commits to its aesthetic so well that it’s almost breathtaking.
Every song on this album reveals Dawson’s mastery of old time dialect. (Or Dawson does such an incredible job painting that world that it seems like he has a mastery of old time dialect.) Dawson also clearly has an eye for storytelling, as each song serves as a vignette about the underclass of Bryneich. “Soldier” tells the story of, you guessed it, a soldier on the eve of battle thinking about his love. “Hob” tells the story of a father who brings his infant son to be cured of an ailment by what is presumably a hobgoblin. “Masseuse” tells the story of a maid sick of massaging men who decides to rob a blind monk.
All of these songs paint a picture as vivid as a film, and though this album is frequently strange and clearly not for everyone, I found myself trying to shove this album down people’s throats. Here’s another verse from a song called “Weaver.”
“I steep the wool in a cauldron
Of pummeled gallnuts afloat in urine
Add river water thrice boiled with a blood stone.”
Again. Every word.
Favorite Songs: “Ogre” “Scientist” “Masseuse”
8. Rosalía, Los Ángeles
Sometimes the bulk of my write-ups for these lists are essentially just a long list of qualifiers dragged out long enough so that you think I said something of any substance. The advantage of this method is that I can put weirder stuff in my top ten lists and immediately know what to talk about. “I have never heard an Aimee Mann album before, so this knocked me off my socks.” “Hey, this medieval folk album’s pretty fucking weird and awesome, right?” However, the disadvantage is that it makes me talk less about what truly matters to me in a listening experience.
As for Los Ángeles, another Needle Drop recommendation, I don’t have that crutch. Sure, I guess it’s a little bit of an odd choice to put a flamenco album on this list as opposed to some of the more widely critically acclaimed releases of the year. (Spoiler alert: Lorde’s Melodrama and SZA’s CTRL are not on this list.) However, picking Los Ángeles was incredibly easy for me for the two simple reasons.
Let’s take two songs. This is the second track on the album, “De Plata.”
This is the eighth track, “Te Venero.”
My first point is this: Rosalía’s voice is unbelievably gorgeous. She can knock you on your ass with a powerful burst of raw unrestrained emotion and she can sing with pure intimacy and warmth. Either way, with the possible exception of one album coming later on this list, Los Ángeles is a contender for the best sung album of 2017.
The second reason is that Raül Refree’s guitar playing on this album is also unbelievably gorgeous. Now, I haven’t been able to find comprehensive album credits. (In fact, I had to go through a lot of effort to download the album in the fist place because I have a bias against Spotify and… it’s not important. Yes, I paid for it.) However, if I had to take a stab at whether or not these were original or traditional songs based purely on how they sound coming from Raül’s guitar strings, I would guess that people have been playing these songs for hundreds of years. Every song on Los Ángeles feels timeless.
I guess the final thing to talk about is lyrics, which is a little weird for me as I don’t speak Spanish. But for me it honestly didn’t matter because this is an album that aches with beauty. (In fact, if you made me pick a least favorite song, I would go with Rosalía’s cover of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “I See A Darkness” specifically because it’s in english. And even then, it's still pretty fuckin' powerful.) That said, I looked up some translations on Genius and some other sources and to my complete utter lack of surprise, this a dark album. Lots of heartbreak. Lots of self-harm. Lots of death.
Still, if you like your beauty with an extra serving of beauty, give this one several dozen listens.
Favorite Songs: “Catalina” “Te Venero” “La Hija De Juan Simon”
7. Jonwayne, Rap Album Two
Some of what I’m about to say might make it sound like I don’t like Rap Album One. This is not the case. After you’re done listening to Los Ángeles, go listen to Rap Album One. It’s a fantastic album.
That said, it’s easy to be a little bit dismissive of Rap Album One if you’re of a mindset like my own and certain habits in indie rap that have gotten under your skin. While there’s plenty of introspection and incredible production to be found, it’s also a lot of rapping about rapping and the mainstream and subtext hidden behind abstraction for abstraction’s sake. As I said, I’m being needlessly reductive, and I liked it a lot. But it just wasn’t particularly special to me. But it’s clear that one day he was going to make something out of this world.
Then something happened between Rap Album One and Rap Album Two. I'll let the man tell it himself.
I wanted self-improvement only in regards to music. On Rap Album Two, Jonwayne goes far beyond what that concept can mean.
Rap Album Two starts with some brag raps. However, the difference between these brag raps and his brag raps of old, as well as a lot of other rapper’s brag raps, is a directness that I felt was missing in his older work. Many an indie rapper hides the bragging in their brag raps behind layers of random meaningless word play (although that can be fun if done right), but Jonwayne writes with the sharpness of a sword and a focus many “lyrical miracle” rappers lack. Quick example:
“Remember I’m a poor man, but got a fucking kingdom up in here
Where the beer flows like memes, and seeded without a peer
See I had it up to here, all these doubters in my ear
Tryin to tell me I don’t have the whole world up on my spear”
If you look closely, you can see the cracks in the armor. He’s poor. He’s drinking by himself, part of the self-destruction he wrote about in the above note. He’s surrounded by people who are telling him that he isn’t good enough when he knows how much he’s capable of. That feeling continues on the rest of the song, as well as the next few.
But then things get darker and more introspective. “Out of Sight” finds Jonwayne rapping about the insecurities that come with success, isolation, and valuing your career over your sense of self-worth. “Afraid of Us” talks about the shame he felt missing the birth of his nephew, his alcoholism ruining his peer’s shows, and being afraid to face the people he loves because he feels like he’s been a burden on everyone around him. “Blue Green” address the night he wrote about in his note, waking up in his vomit covered bed with the knowledge that he could’ve died if he slept on his back.
All of this may sound overwhelming, but again, this is an album about self-improvement. It’s not about rubbing your face in the darkness so much as the importance of trying to overcome it. The difference between wanting to get sober and actually doing it because in the end, being happy and healthy is more important than success. And when you’ve reached those highs, hey, why not slay a mic or two?
Rap Album Two is a testament to evolution. It’s an antidote to the idea that you have to suffer to make great art. True, a dark night in 2014 served as the spark for this album, but this isn’t an album about looking back. It’s an album about looking forward and, hopefully, getting better.
Favorite Songs: “Human Condition” “City Lights” “Afraid of Us”
6. Sampha, Process
Last year, I wrote about Anderson .Paak’s Malibu. I spent the majority of that write-up gushing over the man’s talent as opposed to actually talking about the album. Most of me stands by that decision. After all, Anderson .Paak is an extraordinarily talented artist, and 2017 felt like a lesser year because I didn’t hear that much from him. That said, I do kind of wish I talked about the album more. There’s a lot to say about it.
When I write these things, half that time I don’t know what I’m going to say before I say it. (You’ve probably figured that out by now.) I think there’s a more than likely chance that I’m not going to talk about Process at all, and instead spend this whole time talking about Sampha himself.
There’s an element I don’t like in a lot of singers, and that is the impulse to over-emote. In music terms, “over-emote” can mean many things. But what I’m specifically talking about is the need to overcompensate for a perceived lack of passion in any given song by going out of your way to sing it in an assaultively precious or overdramatic manner.
I don’t like being critical of people in these top tens, but a good example of what I’m talking about is Sam Smith.
Sam Smith, at least to me, cannot sing without sounding like he’s crying. Emotion to Sam Smith isn’t seemingly sold with subtlety or sophistication or any sense of suppleness. (Sorry.) Every note has to be sung like he’s having a breakdown. The problem with this approach, at least to me and my sensibility, is that it tells the audience how to feel as opposed to just letting them feel it. “Show, don’t tell” as the saying goes. But if you’re going to tell, at the very least, tell it without sounding like you’re trying so hard.
Sampha sounds just as emotional to me as Sam Smith, but the difference is that it seems to come naturally to him. Some people are just born with a voice, and Sampha’s voice is naturally rich with emotional directness. I can imagine someone tearing up at the mere thought of him singing “Humpty Dumpty.”
But one can’t simply have an astonishingly engaging voice and call it a day. (Although it more than helps.) Thankfully, Sampha cuts out a unique corner for himself in the neo-soul world thanks to the broad range of sounds he can execute with sublime effect and an equally strong pen. “Plastic 100°C” and “Blood on Me” both capture perfectly the sense of dread that lingers behind all your thoughts and feelings when you’re going through hard times. “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” takes us through an intimate journey through his childhood home and his relationship with his mother who passed away during the recording of the album. “Reverse Faults” details a relationship in which he incorrectly blamed everything on her.
All these songs are written with a rare sense of clarity that propelled them beyond the reaches of most artists thanks to their production and arrangements. Make no mistake about it: Sampha will be a household name. And if he never does become one, then he sure as hell deserves to be. He may not always have uplifting pop to offer, but I’ve never heard a voice like his before, and it needs to be heard by everyone.
Favorite Songs: “Plastic 100°C” “Kora Sings” “Reverse Faults”
5. Tyler, The Creator, Flower Boy
I imagine a lot of people writing their year end lists were faced with the task of writing about this album (assuming it was included in their lists, of course), and a lot their gut reactions were to write something along the lines of, “I never thought I would put a Tyler, the Creator album on a best of the year list.” Hell, I almost did the same thing myself. However, at least in my case, I don’t think that would be entirely truthful.
I’ve always thought that Tyler was an incredibly underrated producer. Sure, he wears his Neptunes influence on his sleeves and he had some habits to work through just like everybody else. But Tyler has the ability to create an atmosphere unlike a lot of producers. He can put you in a nightmarish haze, like on Schoolboy Q’s “The Purge.” Or he can put you in a jazzy paradise, like on his own song, “Treehome95.”
But yeah, it’s easy for all those elements to be drown out in the force of personality that is Tyler, from the intentionally edgy murder fantasies of his early work to the jokey persona of his social media accounts to the, well… just about everything about him. I always thought he was a talented rapper in his own right, and it was hard not to get swept up in the fresh sounds coming from Odd Future when they first started making waves, particularly if you were a hip hop fan in the mid to late 2000s. But rapping always seemed to be the thing he did the worst.
Still, it was only a matter of time before Tyler’s rapping ability caught up to his production skills. And they finally did on Scum Fuck Flower Boy.
As you may have been able to tell, I like introspection. I like music that feels like only the person I’m listening to could’ve written it. In many ways, this album is just as emotionally raw as Rap Album Two or some of the albums we’ll get into a little later on this list. The difference, however, is how Tyler delivers the message. “See You Again” has Tyler chasing an ideal lover that he seems to be unable to find in real life. While a certain amount of heartache permeates through the lyrics and the production, it still has a degree of charm and whimsy that prevents the song from spiraling down into the realm of the depressing.
“Garden Shed” takes a closer look at his sexuality. I can only imagine how intimate and scary something like coming out of the closet, or in this case the “garden shed,” can be. Yet, Tyler chooses to do so by surrounding us with a lush laid back sound, like there’s nothing to be afraid of in the first place. “911/Mr. Lonely” takes a similar tactic in dissecting his public persona and “November” does the same with a deep dive into his insecurities and fears, and how he wants to return to a time when he was happier.
It feels like we’re finally meeting the real Tyler, warts and all, on this album. But in order for him to come out of his shell, he had to surround himself with pure radiance. This is one of the darkest albums of the year, but also one of the most uplifting. I’m sure I’m the millionth person to say this, but I’ll happily do so: This is the album I’ve always wanted from him, and I’m ecstatic that we all finally got it.
Side note: In the past, Tyler’s talked about wanting to do a jazz album. I want this to actually happen.
Favorite Songs: “See You Again” “Garden Shed” “Boredom”
4. Jay-Z, 4:44
Speaking of the kinds of albums I’ve always wanted from certain artists…
Alright, let me back up for a second. I was expecting nothing from this album. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jay just as much as everyone else, I would never deny him his legacy or the impact his music has had on hip hop as a whole, and Reasonable Doubt is still one of my favorite albums of all time.
That said, like a lot of Jay fans, I haven’t been particularly warm to a lot of his post “retirement” releases. Kingdom Come has a song or two, but otherwise, it was a massive disappointment, especially if you’re following up The Black Album. American Gangster was alright, but I think I’m a little more down on it than a lot of people seem to be. Blueprint 3 was a middling pop rap album at best, although I like some of the songs on it quite a bit. And then finally came Magna Carta Holy Grail, an album I deeply hated, but for reasons I think I want to get into some other day.
More importantly though, I used to daydream about a time where my favorite popular artists would outgrow the need, or even the desire really, to chart. That they would just make whatever they want to make, and not worry about whether a single takes off or if there’s some gimmick in place to sell more albums. (“I’m retiring…” Black Album. “I’m coming back…” Kingdom Come. You know what I mean.) Yes, I’m being selfish, but if Beyoncé wanted to say “fuck it” and release an album of jazz covers or something like that, she should feel free to do it and not have to worry about whether or not it sells. (Also, I would do vile things to get my hands on that hypothetical album if it somehow came into existence.)
So yeah, I was expecting nothing from 4:44. I’ve never been happier to be this surprised or this wrong.
There’s plenty to talk about when it comes to 4:44. The honest confessional nature of many of the tracks. The deep dissections of race relations in America, particularly when it comes to finance and the larger forces at work that keep the black community down. The critical eye at some of his past music and the lifestyle he used to promote. Really, to summarize the content as a whole, just the sheer amount of growth and maturity in general.
But what I come back to again and again is the intimacy. Part of what I didn’t like about Magna Carta is how it sounds like it came off the label assembly line, which was surprising to me, given the sheer volume of talent behind the boards and in the credits. I guess what I’m saying is that it was a little too glitzy. A little too polished. A little too sanitary, in a certain sense. Moreover, given the content of the album, it sounded like Jay was not only above you, but beyond the realm of your comprehension. You’re just some dude. Jay was in a board room with wafts of cigar smoke leaking through the closed door.
Thanks to No I.D.’s understated but emotional production and Jay’s focus returning to his writing, for the first time in a decade, it feels like Jay’s letting us in. The throne’s been conquered. The rap game’s bowed down. Now it’s time to hear what troubles him as a human being, as a role model, and most importantly, as a father and a husband.
Favorite Songs: “4:44” “Family Feud” “Marcy Me”
3. Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked at Me
Oh boy.
Phil Elverum, the man behind Mount Eerie, lost his wife Geneviève Castrée on July 9th, 2016 to pancreatic cancer. In the weeks after her death, Phil started recording A Crow Looked at Me.
He makes you feel every moment of it.
Favorite Songs: All of them.
2. Kendrick Lamar, DAMN.
At the end of the day, is there really anything left to be said about this album? At this point, I’m sure you’ve read one or two top ten albums of 2017 articles, and at least by the looks of things, the vast majority of them have put this album on their list. A great deal of them even gave it the number one spot. So yeah, you either already know it’s great or you think it’s overrated and at this point, nobody’s really going to change your mind.
So with that said, here’s a bunch of random disjointed thoughts about Kendrick and DAMN., and hopefully I’ll have figured out something to say by the end of this section. And don’t get me wrong, I love this album and my goal isn’t to sound dismissive. It’s just that I feel like I’ve been reading endless articles and pieces and whatevers about DAMN. pretty much from the moment it came out, and at this point, it’s almost intimidating to try to add something new.
Here goes nothing.
1. This seems to be an increasingly unpopular opinion, but I like DAMN. more than good kid, m.A.A.d city. Granted, I have a somewhat strange relationship with that latter album, given that when I first listened to it I didn’t know how I felt, but I woke up the next day thinking it was the best album I had heard that whole year. That said, to put it simply, I just find DAMN. a little more interesting. I like that DAMN. has a more diverse set of sounds and production styles, I think the writing on DAMN. has a little more depth, I like saying DAMN. more, it doesn’t have Drake, and so on and so forth. But the bottom line is that one of my favorite aspects of Kendrick is that fame’s only made his music more mercurial, and DAMN. falls more in line with my definition of appealing.
2. To Pimp a Butterfly is better than both. Come at me.
3. The masses on the internet, a lot of whom are embarrassingly my age, are incredibly quick to call an album a “classic” and to label a rapper “one of the greatest,” if not “greatest of all time.” If Kendrick releases one or two more albums of this level of quality, I think we can at least start having conversations about him being “ONE of the greatest.” Key word: one.
4. I’ve read a lot of individual best songs of the year lists, and a lot of them have a song or two from this album. The cool part about this is that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every song on the album except “BLOOD.” at least once on someone else’s list. I think it’s amazing that this is an album with so much to give for so many different kinds of music fans.
5. “HUMBLE.” is my least favorite song on the album. The most radio friendly Kendrick songs are almost always the ones I like least. Case in point: I don’t think “Backseat Freestyle” is the worst song on good kid, m.A.A.d city, but if we’re ranking the individual songs on that album, I’d put in the bottom half of the bottom half. That said, it’s still a great song, and please forgive my snobbery.
6. If I had to pick a personal favorite, I’d go “FEAR.”
And yeah, that’s about all I got. I can’t wait for whatever he puts out next.
Favorite Songs: “ELEMENT.” “FEAR.” “DUCKWORTH.”
1. Brockhampton, The Saturation Trilogy
Quick caveat: If you thought about the trilogy as three individual albums as opposed to one big release like I’ve chosen to do, then I don’t think any one of them by themselves quite reach the highs of DAMN. But I couldn’t separate them. To me at least, all three of them feel like such a fantastic continuation of one another that it would feel to me like splitting siblings. You take them all together because it’s the right thing to do.
Now, with that out of the way, something changed in my attitude in 2017.
I, as a millennial, used to like dumping on my fellow Gen Yers just as much as everyone else. And who could blame me? After all, yes, a lot of our behavior can be pretty irksome, our spending habits can be hard for older generations to pin down and thus profit off us, and we’re the generation taking over as they begin to die off. We're young and we’re scary.
But then the election happened, and I started taking all the millennial bashing personally. Every time I read another article about “Millennials ruining X” and “Millennials are letting Y INSTITUTION die” or whatever such nonsense or another snarky ass tweet about us, a petty primal force in the back of my mind wakes up and wants to respond with something along the lines of “Sorry I didn’t get fucked up at Woodstock enough to keep Applebees afloat” (or whatever business we’re killing off this week) or a “Go stick your hands in the pockets of your flannel like you’ve done your entire lives and sulk in the corner with your VHS of Reality Bites like the neglected generational children you are, you fucking Gen Xer fucks.”
(I don’t actually feel this strongly. I just like to amuse myself.)
The older generations waited until we entered high school to elect Bush, then right as we left college, they threw us Trump. So yes, a group of millennials from all over the country of different races and sexual orientations who created a movement and caught the world’s attention entirely on their own merit and skill get the album of the year from me. On my blog that nobody reads. Take that, uhh… someone.
Now, generational solidarity is all well and good. But even if I wasn’t up my own ass with millennial pride, it wouldn’t mean much if the music weren't great. And granted, when you’ve released three albums in one year, you occupy more real estate in any given music fan’s head. Luckily, however, the music’s incredible.
Saturation, at least for me, came out of absolute nowhere, and I fell in love with it almost immediately. In fact, I would even say it’s my favorite of the trilogy overall because it has a structure that most resembles an arc, from the bangers in the beginning of the album to the slower more emotional content of the back half. Saturation II came out a few months later, and while to me it felt more like a continuation of the first album than something different, I still loved it, and I bumped it nonstop just like I did the first album. Then Saturation III pretty much ended the year as far as I’m concerned. It had a different approach, it had a consistency in tone, the bangers were even more banger-y, and the emotional songs hit a lot harder. (If we’re ranking, I’d go 1, 3, 2.)
In the end, however, the trilogy takes the number one spot for me because these albums made me more excited about music than anything this year, and much like what I said about Wildflower last year, it me stupidly happy. As I said, I wanted to honor new things in my music lists, and it doesn’t get much newer than Brockhampton.
Favorite Songs from Saturation: “Gold” “Bank” “Milk”
Favorite Songs from Saturation II: “QUEER” “SWAMP” “JUNKY”
Favorite Songs from Saturation III: “BOOGIE” “BLEACH” “SISTER / NATION”
Honorable Mentions:
Big K.R.I.T., 4eva Is A Mighty Long Time
Billy Woods, Known Unknowns*
Conway, G.O.A.T.
Daniel Caesar, Freudian
Gabriel Garzón-Montano, Jardín
The Horrors, V
Hus Kingpin & Big Ghost, Cocaine Beach
Ibeyi, Ash
Ibibio Sound Machine, Uyai
J Hus, Common Sense
Jlin, Black Origami
Joey Bada$$, ALL-AMERIKKKAN BADA$$
Julien Baker, Turn Out the Lights
Kirin J. Callinan, Bravado*
Lorde, Melodrama
milo, Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?!
Moses Sumney, Aromanticism*
Nai Palm, Needle Paw
Open Mike Eagle, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream*
P.O.S., Chill, dummy
Protomartyr, Relatives in Descent*
Quelle Chris, Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often*
Rapsody, Laila’s Wisdom
Rina Sawayama, RINA*
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Soul of a Woman
St. Vincent, Masseduction
Syd, Fin
SZA, Ctrl
Vagabon, Infinite Worlds
Valerie June, The Order of Time*
Vince Staples, Big Fish Theory
The XX, I See You
Didn’t Listen To:
I’m sure there’s millions of albums I didn’t get around to by virtue of simply not knowing about them.
TV
Holy shit did TV win 2017.
I almost feel like I could make a separate top ten list out of what I didn’t include on my actual one and it would still be at least comparatively great to the original.
This was such a great year for television that it could include 13 Reasons Why, the work of art I hated the most throughout this whole year across all genres, and it was still the undisputed winner of the year.
“But why?” You might ask. Simple. For all the reasons stated in the above sections, but combined. To take from the movies list, television had a a rebellious spirit that I hope continues into next year. To take from the video games section, TV did a better job telling stories this year than it did last year. (Substantially so, to be perfectly honest, and TV was pretty fucking great last year as well.) To take from the music section, the quality of each of these shows are so close to one another that this list was basically an exercise in splitting microscopic hairs and wrestling with my own insecurities and hang-ups when it comes to list making.
And on top of everything I said in the above Frankenstein paragraph, let me add a few adjectives: Television was more ambitious, daring, prescient, and impactful for me this year than plenty of the more recent years in this here prestige television era. There was so much incredible TV this year that at times, I found it overwhelming and would actively complain about it on my various social media accounts.
But I don’t want it to stop, and I have so much to add that I don’t know where to begin. So instead, I’ll just get to the list. Keep doing you, TV. Keep doing you.
Runner-Up: Dear White People
I hated the movie.
I wanted to love it more than anything. The cast is incredible, and as somebody who attended college with a lot of effete white people trying their damndest to not look racist while actually being racist as hell, I wanted the movie to pack the satirical punch that anything involving race on a college campus could theoretically have. The subject matter is more than ripe.
Unfortunately, I left the theater disappointed. (Also, weird side note: I saw this movie as the first part of a double feature with Whiplash, which is probably one of my favorite movies of the decade.) I thought the directing, at least visually, was poor. I thought the script, both from a narrative and content standpoint, was too unfocused. And most of all, satirically, it attempted to be about seemingly everything, and thus was effectively about nothing. There’s plenty of merit to be found, but I wanted something specific out of the movie, and I didn’t get it.
Dear White People, the TV show, is just about everything I wanted from the movie.
Now, some of the movie’s biggest flaws are still readily apparent in the show. In the movie, some of the characters come across more like tropes and archetypes rather than nuanced human beings, and as such, they felt more like props and points to be shot down rather than characters. (Particularly Troy, Coco, and to a certain extent, Samantha.) In the show, the parts of those characters I didn’t like are still present, but a great deal of effort was put into injecting these characters with more humanity, and it pays off incredibly well.
We learn that Troy is, at his core, a repressed boy living in the shadow of his father. We learn that Coco’s seemingly gut impulse to undermine Samantha and the racial conversation at Winchester University comes from a lifetime of her being routinely humiliated over the dark shade of her skin. We learn how much Samantha’s political passion costs her, be it in friendships or relationships. We get to learn more about Reggie, Samantha’s right hand man in the movement, and Joelle, Samantha’s best friend on campus. (Hopefully in season two we’ll get more Joelle. I like Ashley Blaine Featherson quite a bit and I like her character.)
We also get more a focused subject matter, as each episode not only delves deep into an individual character, but also a more focused storyline revolving the aftermath of the blackface party and how it leads to a harrowing night with Reggie in one of the best episodes of television that aired all year. I still think the show can be a little clunky and heavy handed, but I learned to care for each of these characters deeply, and the only reason this show didn’t make it onto the main list is for a particularly stupid reason I’ll get into in a second. I know I sound down on it, but I can honestly say that I anticipate season two more than most returning shows, let alone most returning shows on Netflix.
Favorite Episodes: “Chapter II” “Chapter V” “Chapter IX”
10. American Vandal
So about that particularly stupid reason…
The version of this list you are currently reading is the second version. The first version had Dear White People at number ten and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in the runner-up slot. I was perfectly happy with that list, but then I went home for the holidays and I found myself pushing American Vandal on all of my family members. (They asked me for good comedies. I gave them one.) Then after talking about it so much, I rewatched the whole series in three or four days and concluded that it had to be on this list.
So off went Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and then it came time to have an American Vandal versus Dear White People debate. Of course, the latter is the more socially relevant of the two, whereas American Vandal is a simple true crime parody about kids spray painting dicks on cars. In a year like 2017, the winner should be clear.
But as I said about Richard Dawson’s Peasant in the albums section, 2017 was the year I got excited about strange works that commit, and I think you can apply the same principal to anything that goes this hard at being this intentionally dumb. That may sound like an insult, but I promise you it isn’t.
Think about the premise of the show. “A true crime documentary parody where instead of investigating a murder trial, it’s a kid who got expelled from his high school for supposedly spray painting penises on all of the teacher’s cars in the faculty parking lot.” Now think about how little effort would have to theoretically go into making that show. You could make the hammiest, most over-the-top jokey show on earth, and hell, it might even be funny. But it would be disposable.
The brilliance of American Vandal is how much effort goes into bolstering the stupidest premise for a show ever. How it commits so hard to its documentary format that most of the jokes aren’t ever presented to you as jokes, and thus could completely fly over your head if you’re not paying attention. How nuanced all the performances are, particularly from Jimmy Tatro as our prime suspect Dylan. How, and I still can’t believe I’m saying this, they went to extraordinary lengths to actually make the central mystery of the show genuinely compelling.
And then you take a look at the little touches, and they’re equally as fantastic. The opening titles, which are hilarious in their own over-the-top nature, has a quick shot of a broken statue’s head. It has nothing to do with the case. So why is it there? Because that’s the kind of pretentious bullshit that goes into the opening titles of true crime documentaries. It’s a great joke, and I didn’t even notice it until my second time around. Similarly, I didn’t think anyone had a decent “I didn’t understand Inception” joke until Dylan’s mini-rant about how he does understand the multilayered dreams, but not how they all entered said dreams in the first place.
There are an infinite number of jokes just like these, and I’m sure there are many more I simply didn’t notice.
American Vandal makes this list because not only is it funny, but also inspiring in a certain sense. It’s a show that goes the extra mile just to get a laugh when it really really doesn't have to. It’s a show that tells a bigger joke than the one of its premise: What if we took this giant dick joke and actually spun a great show out of it?
Favorite Episodes: “A Limp Alibi” “Growing Suspicion” “Clean Up”
9. Mr. Robot
I loved season one of Mr. Robot, but you could certainly argue that it was a little too heavy on plot, and it didn’t give its supporting characters nearly the same amount of time to breathe and develop. I also loved season two of Mr. Robot, though you could certainly argue that it was the polar opposite of season one in that it was all character and not enough plot. I personally would argue that this move made me care way more about the characters than I already did, but hey, to each their own.
Season three of Mr. Robot finally found the balance. It found a way to move the plot forward, completely shatter the world and the rules in which Mr. Robot used to operate, and evolve each character in the process. To me, this was everything the show could’ve always been. And yes, it wasn’t always perfect (*cough cough* the Trump stuff *cough cough cough*), but in a weaker year this would’ve been much higher on my list.
So now I revert to the trick I turn to whenever I want to focus on a single thing X SHOW does well so I’m not rambling on about everything, but there’s many elements to choose from in this season of Mr. Robot. There’s the fact that even after its third season, I’m still head over heels in love with how this show looks. There’s the new additions to the cast and the continuing expansion of the side characters, including Bobby Cannavale’s Irving, Joey Bada$$’s Leon, and Grant Chang’s Grant. There’s so on and there’s so forth.
But the part I have to narrow out this year is the focus on not only expanding the Mr. Robot world, but the way they decided to change things as well. It’s almost as if Mr. Robot realized that it needs to show some new sides in order to stop itself from becoming stale. Case in point, if memory serves me correct, this is the first time we see Elliot in his Mr. Robot state, but still as Elliot. It's a small addition on paper, but as a fan of the show, it felt like a huge moment for me. Or at the very least, it was awesome to see Rami Malek find new acting muscles to flex.
Oh yeah, and as a result of stuff that went down in this show this year, thousands of people are now dead, including a few of the show’s biggest characters, and stuff I honestly thought wouldn’t happen until the very end of the show happened in this season's front half. Neither of these things means “great TV,” mind you. I’m just trying to make a point about the show doing big things, and it did some big fucking things, and nobody can accuse it of being light on plot.
I get the feeling that a lot of critics have turned against this show, and I get why, but I’m not one of them. Season three was its best season. Also, the faux one shot episode was truly something to behold.
Favorite Episodes: “eps3.1_undo.gz” “eps3.4_runtime-error.r00” “eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko”
8. The Deuce
It’s easy to gleam a somewhat microcosmic perspective off a lot of the David Simon shows. While much of The Wire was devoted to pointing out the stark differences between how the legal and non-legal power structures of Baltimore operate, it also goes out of its way to highlight what they have in common. City hall doesn’t run like a heroin empire, but they sure do have an uncomfortable amount in common. All this leads to the larger questions: Does this system play out statewide? Or nationally? Or maybe even globally? It’s hard to tell, but part of what makes The Wire one of the greatest shows of all time is how much room it leaves you to think to yourself, “There’s something familiar about all of this.”
I would argue that the same is somewhat true of Treme. Though it’s a much more character focused show than The Wire was, it’s a show with a sort of inverse worldview. The Wire is a show about local institutions failing because they’re used as nothing more than a means of profit and ladder climbing. Treme’s attitude is that while the institutions of America often fail us, they’re also capable of giving us a city as beautiful and culturally diverse as New Orleans. What does the city or community I live in have in common with the people who want to preserve the New Orleans of old and the ones who want to tear it all down?
What I like about The Deuce is it’s smaller scope. It’s less about dissecting the foundations that we build our conventions upon and more about simply bringing us to a world that ran by its own set of rules and getting invested in the people who have to forge their path inside of it. In this case, that world is 42nd street in New York. Specifically, the area we might know nowadays as the theater district. The area known as “The Deuce.” The old capital of prostitution and pornography in Manhattan.
The people who occupy this world are people who may seem familiar to us. There’s a set of twin brothers, one of whom is trying to do the best he can running his bar, and the other one a total fuck up. There’s the prostitute who wants out of the game, and stumbles into the world of “filmmaking.” There are the pimps who trap the prostitutes in a life of abject misery. There’s the rich college student who wants to rebel by slumming it with the other inhabitants. There’s the construction foreman who can’t work anymore because of his health, and out of stubbornness, turns to crime. There’s the young gay bartender and the cop who wants better from his department and the mobsters getting into real estate and so many others.
Though there are powers working above all of these people, it often feels like these are the ones who make all the rules. As such, they’ve developed a kind of social contract. The prostitutes go to jail when it’s their turn. The pimps have to pack it in before sunrise. The pornography filmmakers only show their work under specific circumstances. Mess with one of the prostitutes, you’ll be harmed. Nobody’s happy, but everyone gets to go home with a little bit of money and a little bit of something adjacent to status.
That is, until the system breaks down. When a prostitute and an institution in this tiny world gets murdered, and nobody outside the bubble gives a shit. That’s when everyone realizes how meaningless it all is.
The world of The Deuce is a bleak one, but it isn’t without it’s bright spots. I wouldn’t want to live there personally, but I could see how some could call it home.
Favorite Episodes: “Pilot” “Why Me?” “My Name Is Ruby”
7. Rick and Morty
What a year to be a Rick and Morty fan, huh?
In the scope of a single year, Rick and Morty fans went from being normal everyday fans to the new internet enemy de jour. (You know, besides Donald Trump and his legions of morons.) To be perfectly fair, they’ve certainly made a case for themselves. After all, if I had never seen the show, and I logged on to Twitter to see videos of random assholes freaking out at McDonalds employees over the now fabled Szechuan Sauce and assertions that I have to be of a certain intelligence to grasp the show’s depths, I would probably have thought to myself, “Fuck this show and everyone who loves it.”
But I can’t say that. I’ve been a fan of the show since the night it aired, and I do consider it one of my favorite shows on television. But no, I’m not going to go out of my way to get the Szechuan Sauce or tell you that you’re too stupid to “get” the show or go on the internet and bloviate about how I much I relate to Rick and how I want to live like him. (Because I apparently want to be a suicidally depressed alcoholic who, despite his bravado and super-intelligence, is hopelessly empty inside.)
That said, I think the fan hatred is a little overblown. But the key phrase is “a little.” The harassment of the extraordinarily talented female writers was vile and completely unacceptable. But I don’t think a lot of the behavior of Rick and Morty fanboys is all that different than the behavior of many other subcultures, fan groups, and internet communities. Look at the behavior of anime fans or video game fans or the literal riots sports fans have started in the past. The only difference between them and Rick and Morty fans is that the latter happened to get more attention in 2017.
None of this excuses anything, mind you. I'm just saying that harassment and stupidity isn’t a Rick and Morty problem. It’s something much bigger than one medium, let alone one television show. (Still, if you’re bothering McDonalds employees or harassing the writers, you can go fuck yourself.)
So what about the show?
Obviously I liked it quite a bit. After all, it is on this list. However, I don’t think I’m as crazy about it as I was with the previous seasons. There were times when I thought certain episodes felt a little over-structured, and while those episodes still make for great television, they didn’t hit me as hard emotionally as they did intellectually. Or to put it in a different way, I didn’t feel like I got my “end of ‘Rick Potion #9’” moment like I did a few times last season. (Except for the therapy scene in "Pickle Rick.")
Also, to get a small complaint out of the way, Jerry might be my favorite character on the show, and his more absent role this season was definitely a bummer for me.
But I said “most of the time” for a reason. Though the moments of emotional impact didn’t land as hard with me, they led to the most consistent tone the show’s ever had, and this season, even by Rick and Morty standards, was pretty damn dark. I also feels like season three was its most creatively ambitious and its most introspective. In the end, this is a season about why Rick can’t always be in control. Because if all you do is create chaos and attack, then there’s nothing or nobody to keep the seams together. All that would be left in the center is rot.
I love the show. I always will so long as there’s a rudder. The behavior of everyone around it is disheartening. But at the end of the day, the show at the center is still remarkably strong and funny, and I’ll wait as long as I need to for season four.
Favorite Episodes: “The Rickshank Redemption” “Pickle Rick” “The Ricklantis Mixup”
6. Better Things
In my mental fantasies and the images my brain projects to keep my precious ego afloat, somebody who works on Better Things is reading this. And if that daydream were to come true, I’d have to say to that person that I’m so sorry that so much of the conversation around your truly incredible show has revolved around the deplorable actions of one man. Granted, Louis C.K.’s roles on the show as co-creator and co-writer are rather sizable ones, and I’m sure you understand why people have to at least bring it up. But it’s also insulting, and you deserve better.
Pamela Adlon deserves better. Mikey Madison deserves better. Hanna Alligood deserves better. Olivia Edward deserves better. Celia Imrie deserves better. Everybody involved with the making of Better Things that isn’t named Louis C.K. deserves better because they’re making one of the best shows on television.
So rather than focusing on all the horrid shit going on behind the scenes of Better Things, let’s instead talk about how much of an improvement season two is over season one, which was already incredible in its own right.
Let’s start with the directing. This season, Pamela Adlon directed every episode of the show, and if she isn’t directing more in the next few years, then fuck this entire industry because clearly it screwed up. (Or she chose not to, in which case, cool, but I would then plead with her to reconsider.) There’s a masterful confidence behind how each scene is structured and shot. How all the scenes weave together visually. How everything seems so deliberately crafted, yet at the same time, completely natural and effortless.
Let’s also talk about the evolution of Sam as a character. Now true, Sam was already a great character begin with, but I would argue that this season plays more with Sam’s behavior and the occasional grey areas this can lead her. Early on the season, Sam breaks up with a “nice guy.” It isn’t, shall we say, a pleasant breakup. In fact, she basically tears him to pieces. On one hand, she’s right. He’s not really a “nice guy” so much as he uses his civility as a weapon to be more demanding than he thinks he is. On the other hand, I think we can question whether or not she goes too far. There’s a line where moral righteousness turns ugly, and though I can’t find a full link to demonstrate, she goes back and forth over that line several times, and we’re left to question how we're supposed to feel.
There’s another scene where Sam’s middle daughter Frankie is giving Sam a little too much shit over her age and her career decisions at a Bar Mitzvah dinner. Sam lets Frankie go on and on until Sam’s called to the stage to give a speech. So Sam quietly gets up, casually takes Frankie’s cake, dumps it into Frankie’s lap in a subtle enough manner so that nobody notices, and goes on stage to give her speech. I laughed my ass off at the scene, but again, she’s dumping cake on her teenage daughter. There’s something a little fucked up about that, isn’t there?
I could go on. I could talk about the writing and the acting and, at least to me, some bold creative choices. But that would be me putting off writing the only conclusion I can think of: Better Things is Pamela Adlon’s show. It’s her vision, she decides what gets made, and it’s her voice. To look at Better Things and only see him is a disservice to the woman who ultimately calls the shots, and the ascent of Pamela Adlon as a new artistic voice rather than the woman who makes other people’s work better makes me enormously happy for her. She deserves nothing but success and respect.
Favorite Episodes: “Rising” “Phil” “White Rock”
5. Halt and Catch Fire
If you know the big twist towards the end of Halt and Catch Fire’s final season, you know why so many have compared it to the final season of Six Feet Under. Or you’ve seen the latter show and not the former, in which case, I might’ve slightly spoiled what happens. But you were warned about spoilers, so as it’s been hinted at since season two, Gordon finally succumbs to his brain disorder and dies three episodes before the finale, just like Nate Fisher did way back when.
But can I tell you all something? If you take that final season of Six Feet Under as a whole, I would actually argue that it’s one the weakest seasons of the show. Six Feet Under is one of those shows I’ve watched all the way through so many times that the thought of watching it again kind of makes me want to puke, so granted, it’s been a while since I’ve seen season five. But if you ask me, it spent the vast majority of its time spinning its wheels and revisiting well worn territory, then produced four of the greatest episodes of the entire show, as well as arguably some of the greatest television ever made. It was enough to make up for what came before, but it always left the mildest of bitter tastes in my mouth.
While Halt and Catch Fire owes much of its final season to Six Feet Under, it manages to avoid similar pitfalls. (Although if you asked me, I would rank season three over season four for reasons that are admittedly a little unfair.) Six Feet Under gave us more of the same, but it did so to set up an expectation, then pull the rug out from under us. I’ll never be sure if it was entirely worth it, but it worked.
Halt and Catch Fire took a similar tactic, but instead of pretending that nothing was going to go wrong, it set up a conflict with real stakes by pitting Gordon and Joe versus Donna in a war over two search engines. Of course, in real life, we know that none of them win. (You may have even found this article using Google.) However, the tension wasn’t who’ll win and who’ll lose. The tension came from the possible desolation of a family we’ve learned to care about over three remarkable seasons of television and one, umm, not so great one. It wasn’t about who finds fame or fortune. It was about who’ll make it out intact, and who’ll get caught in the fallout.
But then Gordon dies, and instead of heading towards an inevitable fracture, the family comes together again. Some storylines still don’t end the way we as fans may have wanted them to from our romantic perch, but everyone seems to have found some sort of peace. Donna and Cameron, a friendship I’ve rooted for harder than most fictional romantic relationships, are off on their next adventure. Joe finds a way to be a prophet, only instead of it being in the tech world, it’s at a school. Bos is happy. Everything’s good.
Now, I know I don’t own the show, but If those writers had hurt a hair on Bos’s head then… let’s just not even go there. Other than that, there’s nothing left to say other than that I loved all the Haley material, that Gordon’s death may have been the most graceful and well-executed TV death I’ve ever seen, that I love Halt and Catch Fire, and that I’ll miss it dearly.
Favorite Episodes: “Who Needs a Guy” “Goodwill” “Search/Ten of Swords”
4. BoJack Horseman
A wealthy family of horses moved into a cabin in Michigan during World War Two. The family consisted of Joseph and Honey Sugarman, their son Crackerjack, and their daughter Beatrice. Honey Sugarman was a lively woman who loved her children, as well as singing and dancing. She’s the kind of person the phrase “larger than life” was presumably invented for. Joseph Sugarman was not larger than life. He was a monster, and though he has relatively little screen time, he well-earns his place in the canon of most despicable TV villains of all time.
Crackerjack went off to the war and was killed in combat. Honey never got over it. She became severely depressed, and her behavior started turning more erratic. One night, she crashed the car while driving around poor Beatrice, and so Joseph had Honey lobotomized. This is the house where Beatrice grew up.
She developed a thick coat of armor, and while she knew the ins and outs of the upper-crust society that Joseph raised her in, you get the sense that she never quite believed in any of it. She almost commits to a nice man from her world, but that all changed the night she met Butterscotch Horseman, a rebel and an aspiring writer. She got pregnant and moved to San Francisco to be with him while he searched for his place amongst the famous beat writers.
It didn’t work out. Neither of their dreams worked out. So they took it out on each other and their son, BoJack Horseman, turning him into the perpetually miserable and sad actor he is today. He not only bears the weight of his own depression, but unknowingly, the trauma of the generations that came before him.
But for the first time ever, there’s hope. And that hope comes in the form of Hollyhock Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzerelli-McQuack, a young woman who grew up with the eight men who adopted her (hence her name) and claims to be his daughter. At first, she’s a bit of an overwhelming presence in his life. But he grows to care for her, and maybe the buck can finally stop with BoJack because, for the first time in many generations, he can offer something other than misery.
I didn’t think as much of season four at first as I did seasons two and three. It’s a little less focused than before. Or more accurately, there’s a greater focus on the ensemble as opposed to just BoJack. But the season grew on me the more I thought about it.
There’s a ton I’m not covering here, including everything with Diane, Todd, Mr. Peanutbutter, and Princess Carolyn, all of which deserves equal amounts of thought and praise. But this season feels like the end of a chapter. Of course, BoJack Horseman is BoJack Horseman, and it’ll assuredly find new ways to break our hearts. But the era of self-destruction seems to be over. Now it seems like the time for the actual work to begin.
Favorite Episodes: “The Old Sugerman Place” “Stupid Piece of Shit” “Time’s Arrow”
3. Master of None
NOTE: The following was written before the news broke out about Aziz Ansari’s sexual misconduct. Though I could've cut this section and written about something else, I’m leaving this up the way I wrote it to remind myself that just because someone you respect shares the same political and social values as you do, it does not mean that person isn't capable of heinous predatory behavior. How the recent news affects my relationship with this show is something I haven't worked out yet, and I don't think I will anytime soon. But I want to remind myself that I was lied to, that I should be angry, and that I believe women when they speak out.
There’s a scene in Lost in Translation where, after a night of mischief, music, and adventure with Charlotte and a merry band of new Japanese friends in Tokyo, Bob calls his wife back home in California. It takes mere moments for their conversation to completely shatter his mood. After all, going from spiritual uplift to talking about carpet samples and fussy children has to take some sort of toll, particularly when you’re probably already depressed to begin with. Does this make Bob a little bit of an asshole? Sure. But if I had to choose between fantastical bliss and responsibility, I’d go the former every time.
I felt like Bob calling his wife after every episode of season two of Master of None, only instead of being a famous Hollywood actor past his prime, I’m a lazy aspiring screenwriter in my mid-twenties in Los Angeles. And in this metaphor, my wife that brings me down isn’t a person. It was reality. Particularly in 2017. (And in 2018, as I’m writing this.)
I know that escapism isn’t a particularly nuanced reason for loving a television show, even in an era where escapism is almost needed more than ever. But Master of None doesn’t go one step beyond mere “Hey, they solved their problems by the end of the episode!” so much as several million leaps and bounds beyond. Simply put, Master of None is the most romantic work of art I experienced in 2017. And I don’t mean “romantic” in a romantic comedy sense. although there is plenty of that. I mean romantic in the sense that every detail of this show seems designed to provoke pleasure and joy from you, even when the characters on screen are miserable.
Consider, for example, the music. Season two begins in Italy, and as such, music supervisors Zach Cowie and Kerri Drootin treat us to some incredible trashy Italian disco (I mean that in the most loving way possible) and electronic music. Then when we return to New York, we’re treated to some even more eclectic song choices, ranging from the Soft Cell song that accompanies Dev’s long lonely ride back to his home or the Italian love song Dev and Francesca dance to during their blizzard night to a piece of hyper obscure Burundian soul music (that I went to great lengths to find the original recording of before giving up and just buying the Master of None soundtrack) that accompanies the introduction of Samuel, the Burundian cab driver. (Apparently, the actor who played Samuel turned them onto the song’s very existence and they had to consult the Burundi government to license it.)
Consider the food porn, an element of the show that interests me more as I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into cooking over the last few years. Of course, food was a huge component of season one. But in season two, not only does it ramp it up by several million percent, but it also ties it more into the plot of individual episodes and season long arcs. We begin the season where the previous season left off with Dev going to Italy to learn how to make pasta. He later becomes the host of a cupcake cooking show. He introduces his Muslim cousin Navid to pork. Every episode seems to involve some sort of overly decadent dinner that would’ve made me get up and eat something if it weren’t for the fact that I’d have to stop watching Master of None.
All of these choices are more than just details. These are artistic decisions lovingly made to immerse you, and you can find these details in every aspect of the technical craft of Master of None, from the way the show looks to the way it’s edited.
But where this loving attention to detail matters most is the storytelling, and while some have some gripes with the way this season’s romantic entanglement played out, I think it knocks it out of the park. Not only does this season keep the varied subject matter at heart like it did last season, but it also plays around with the structure of its episodes, and thanks to its lofty ambitions, Master of None did more with certain individual episodes than what a lot of shows do with their entire runs. “First Date” brings us on a million first dates that Dev sets up with the Master of None equivalent of Tinder. “New York, I Love You” tells us three separate stories from three random minority and immigrant residents. “Thanksgiving,” my favorite episode of television this year, brings us through decades worth of Thanksgivings as Denise comes to terms with her sexual orientation.
Sometimes, a show needs to remind the world what television is capable of. If it happens to entice every human sense on the way, you’ll get no complaints from me.
Favorite Episodes: “The Thief” “New York, I Love You” “Thanksgiving”
2. The Young Pope
There was a time, which seems like centuries ago now, that everyone on my Twitter feed was content to make fun of The Young Pope in the weeks leading up to its US debut. And, really, I couldn’t blame them. After all, HBO made the, in hindsight, incredibly bizarre decision to market The Young Pope as another dark anti-hero show, only instead of a middle class white guy doing bad things, it would be the newly anointed American pope. (Or at least it’s bizarre from the perspective of marketing the tone of a show. From a PR standpoint, yeah, it’s a pretty understandable one.)
Also, it’s called The Young Pope, and that’s pretty funny.
Then I watched Lenny Belardo, soon to be known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, crawl out from under a pyramid of babies in the opening scene of the show. Then I watched Lenny snarl “There’s a new pope, now.” at Voiello when he tries to tell Lenny that Pope John Paul II banned smoking in the papal palace. Then I watched, in one of the more quietly sinister television scenes I think I’ve ever seen, Lenny deliver a terrifying first address where he tells the entire Catholic world that they’re sinners, that they haven’t devoted themselves enough to God, and that he won’t help them because he’s above them. And he does so while completely silhouetted to the entire world, just as he so ordered in the days leading up to the speech because he doesn’t want the world to know his image.
He makes this order in a scene I’ve become obssessed with because of its pacing and Jude Law’s performance, which is the best of his whole career:
“This show is fucking incredible.” I proceeded to text all my friends.
From then on, as Lenny retreated further into the shadows and challenged the church more and more, as Voiello grew closer to Sister Mary and wrestled with his conflicted feelings about his role in the church, as Cardinal Gutierrez sunk further into his secret alcoholism and took on more responsibility, The Young Pope continued to “generate hyperbole” with moments so incredibly bizarre and mesmerizing that it’s literally impossible to keep track of them all. From Lenny’s vision of the dancing Prime Minister of Greenland (accompanied by random facts about Greenland, of course)...
…to Lenny putting on his finest papal robes to “Sexy and I Know It” before addressing the cardinals…
…to the scene where, depending on how you choose to interpret things, Lenny has God kill Sister Antonia…
…to, really, just about every other thing that happens on this show. It’s a show that made me extraordinarily happy and enthusiastic by virtue of its sheer insanity. Now, don’t get me wrong, The Young Pope is no slouch when it comes to storytelling, acting, and particularly its visual presentation and atmosphere. However, there’s a creative energy at play in The Young Pope that I found completely seductive, and I drank all of its Kool-Aid as quickly as I could.
Then, in the final two episodes, the show did the one thing it hadn’t done thus far, which is find a way to be incredibly prescient and moving, particularly with Gutierrez’s handling of the Kurtwell investigation and the release of Lenny’s love letters that show the world that he’s capable of feeling. I didn’t expect anything from The Young Pope, but the one thing I expected least of all so late into the show was a certain level of beauty and heart.
All of which leads me to the final question: Given all the bizarreness and posturing, what is The Young Pope actually about? It’s a good question, as I imagine many felt themselves on the receiving hand of Lenny’s often cold nature. But I think, in the end, it has a pretty simple answer: It’s about a boy who was abandoned by his parents. Then as a man, he became father to a whole religion and turned to the only style of parenting he ever knew.
One last thing: Silvio Orlando’s performance as Voiello and Javier Cámara’s performance as Gutierrez are two of the most underappreciated performances of the year.
Favorite Episodes: “Episode Two” “Episode Eight” “Episode Nine”
1. The Leftovers
Forgive me if the following sounds a little obnoxiously hipster, but I was a fan of The Leftovers from season one. Sure, season one could be a bit of a bumpy ride, particularly in its handling of the teenagers, some turgid plotting, and some visual metaphor cringe. Its lows were low, but its highs, particularly Matt and Nora’s solo episodes, the flashback episode, and the finale, were so high that at least for me, they made up for everything.
Season two is one of my favorite seasons of television ever made. I wish I could give you a concise reason why, but there isn’t one. It’s just everything about it. The acting. The writing. The look. Another laundry list of scenes and moments that I still think about even to this day. Everything.
Gun to my head, I would say that I walked away liking season two a little more than season three. But season three is still not only leaps and bounds my favorite television show of 2017, but my favorite work of art in general of 2017.
And now that I’ve spent the previous paragraphs stalling, it comes time for me to distill why into a few paragraphs, and that simply isn’t possible. I would need every bit of bandwidth the internet has to offer. I could do the think where I just embed a bunch of scenes and have you experience some of The Leftover’s obvious greatness, but I don’t want to pick just three or four, and I already used that move in the Young Pope section.
So I guess I’ll just do what I’m sure everyone else has done and just talk about the series finale.
In this final season, Nora learns (from Mark-Linn Baker playing himself, because this is The Leftovers) that there’s a service that’ll transport you to wherever the two percent of the world’s population who disappeared on October 14, 2011 went to. In the finale, Nora decides to take that trip.
We then cut back to Australia, where we’ve spent the vast majority of the season, where a much older Kevin finds a much older Nora after years of apparently searching for her. She tells him where she went. She explains that everyone who disappeared is in a parallel reality where instead of two percent of the world disappearing, ninety eight percent of the world disappeared. Everyone thought to have been dead from our world is alive, just in another place, and eventually, she decided to come home.
We never see where she went to, but she seems to be serious. The question then becomes whether or not we believe her. We want to, because that would provide us closure. But we can’t ever be certain. Then the show ends.
In one scene of television, The Leftovers distills not only every theme that ran through the show’s run, but the very concept of religion and the human struggle with what happens after death. It’s one of the greatest finales ever made. If not, the greatest.
Favorite Episodes: All of them.
Honorable Mentions:
American Gods
Better Call Saul
Big Mouth
Broad City
Brockmire
Catastrophe
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Fargo
Feud: Bette and Joan
The Good Place
GLOW
Insecure
Lady Dynamite
Man Seeking Woman
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
My Brother, My Brother and Me
Nathan For You
Review
Search Party
Silicon Valley
South Park
Stranger Things
Twin Peaks: The Return
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
You’re The Worst
Didn’t Finish:
Big Little Lies
The Handmaid’s Tale
Will Watch Someday:
Alias Grace
The Americans
The Crown
Queen Sugar
The Vietnam War
