One day, another intelligent species will have control of this planet. In their thirst for knowledge, they’ll comb through everything they can find on those things that called themselves “human beings,” and if they can somehow figure out a way to connect to our internet, one thing will become abundantly clear: The human race hated 2016.

And when they stumble upon our eternal internet roar of “fuck 2016,” I want to be included as one of the many thousands of voices shouting into the void. Many people have said it before me, but here’s the part where I say it for myself: I had a bad year. Part of it is the country I live in. Part of it is for personal reasons. I am painfully aware of how not special I am in either regard.

But here’s the rub, my fellow 2016 haters: We can’t keep turning to despair. It simply won’t help us, and it’ll even cost some of us dearly. Instead, we’re going to have to try harder to find a way to cope with the wavering world in a more productive way. I don’t know whether or not I’ll be able to hold up my end of the bargain, but I’m certainly going to try. So in the spirit of finding a few usable kernels in the big heaping pile of shit, I offer you my top ten favorite games, movies, TV shows, and albums of 2016! (Note: Favorite. Not best.) No, arbitrarily ranking art is not actually productive, so to speak. But in making these lists, I remembered that a lot of truly great stuff came out in 2016, and in a year as relentless as this one, I’ll happily take it.

So here’s how this works. The categories themselves are in order of how I felt about them in 2016 from "worst" to best. For each category, I compiled a massive list of stuff I liked. Some of it is stuff I deeply loved. Some of it was “Yeah, that was alright.” (My point is the bar was low.) I then picked the ten things that stuck out to me the most, as well as a runner-up, some honorable mentions, and stuff I missed. Some of the categories have specific caveats, but other than that, it’s pretty self-explanatory.

So let’s do this!

MAJOR SPOILERS ON EVERYTHING! Also, this one's long, so feel free to skip around.

Video Games

Right off the bat, I have to tell you guys something: There are a few massive holes in the list of games I played this year. There’s a lot of reasons why. The sixty dollar price point that’s always drove me crazy, there was a lot of experimentation in 2016 that I was hesitant to immediately buy into, I had less time. You know, the usual stuff.

But I did play a lot, and for me at least, 2016 was a weird year for games. I’m a narrative guy. Ultimately, what I'm looking for is the marriage of story telling, visual aesthetic, and gameplay. But if I had to emphasize one over all the others, I’d go story telling. 2016, I feel, was a weaker year in game story telling, but an incredible year for the other two.

This was a year where a lot of games eschewed traditional narrative structure in favor of ambiguity and projection, and all of this leaves me feeling at somewhat of an arm’s length this year with games as a whole. But it also had the effect of forcing me to change the way I think about games and what I care about. I still consider myself a story person first, but I think this is the first year I forged emotional connections with games purely through gameplay alone, and for that, I’m grateful.

And hey, there was some decent storytelling this year as well, so let’s get to listing!

Runner-Up: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

I hate stealth. It didn’t do anything to me and I have no gripes with those who enjoy a stealthy approach here and there. I’m just an impatient manchild who plays loud and clumsy. Thus I have a bit of a soft spot for games that actually make me want to sneak and hide, and that includes both of the contemporary Deus Ex games.

Mankind Divided did a great job refining the foundation of Human Revolution. The cities feel more engaging. The augmentations feel more substantial. The side missions feel bigger and bolder. They got rid of the boss fights. From a pure gameplay perspective, Mankind Divided is a marked improvement in just about every way.

I just wish I cared more for the writing. The Deus Ex universe has a rich lore, but I don’t think the story in Mankind Divided engages with it as well as it could've. While Human Revolution’s story wasn’t always particularly eloquent either, it brought up substantial questions about human augmentation and the ethics of artificial intelligence that ended with a big cataclysmic world changing event. Mankind Divided keeps the debate front and center, but the story feels more like act one of a larger story than something meant to stand on its own. It’s essentially an episode in the life of Adam Jensen. The game got bigger, but the world felt smaller.

That, and the pre-order/microtransaction stuff was particularly obscene, even by AAA gaming standards.

10. Even the Ocean

Whiteforge, the main city in Even the Ocean, has survived by harnessing two forms of natural energy. There’s light energy, a green substance that builds vertically and there’s dark energy, a purple substance that builds horizontally. As such, the rich and powerful of Whiteforge live in opulent greenish buildings that tower over the circular purple sprawl where the working class and poor live.

Aliph, a heavy set woman of color with bright dyed hair, works for the power plants and lives somewhere in the sprawl. The power plants of the city start going offline for mysterious reasons, and the big pompous white mayor who lives in the tallest of the central buildings tasks you with fixing them and finding out what’s going on.

You can see the commentary at play. However, if any of this sounds heavy handed, that’s because I’m doing a bad job presenting it. Even the Ocean is pretty easy going from both an ideological and gameplay standpoint. Even when the political subtext takes center stage, it's tastefully done. Most of the time, however, it takes a lighter approach. It presents you with a society, shows you how said society works, and lets you fill in the blanks.

At its core, Even the Ocean is a celebration of humanity. As we venture out into the world of the game, we meet more interesting characters and get to know them a bit before we go on with our job. They all leave an impression and they make Even the Ocean’s world feel nuanced and lived in. It made me want to go outside and have those encounters for myself.

However, Even the Ocean is also a powerful indictment of our impulses towards close-mindedness and disconnect. Social status and class are cerebral constructs that tell us we’re separate when that's far from the case. And while we squabble over nonsense and do our typical human being thing, the place we live in might have different plans for us.

9. Hyper Light Drifter

I swore while playing this game. A lot. It was a problem.

Indeed, I have a laundry list of gripes with Hyper Light Drifter. I often had difficulty telling horizontal surfaces from vertical ones. I thought the game was a bit too unforgiving with its checkpoint frequency. (Or more specifically, its lack of it.) There were times when I felt the game was intentionally stacking the odds against me for the sake of challenge, and thus broke my immersion. All of this sounds like the whiney ramblings of a “noob” or whatever the parlance is these days, but it's when I encounter these problems that I start to become more aware of the math and the code of the game rather than the nuances of the world and the stuff I actually want to think about.

Despite my annoyances, I loved playing Hyper Light Drifter, I loved looking at Hyper Light Drifter, and most importantly, I loved trying to figure out the world and story of Hyper Light Drifter. This is how the game starts:

The opening cinematic for Hyper Light Drifter

There is no dialogue and besides the occasional tutorial prompt, there is no written text. (Yes, I know that’s not entirely true.) It gives you just enough to understand that there is a coherent narrative to tie everything together: You are a diseased drifter trying to find a cure for your ailment in a post-apocalypse. However, there isn’t enough to form one concrete theory, and you’re going to have to interpret large chunks of it for yourself.

Many an indie game has tried this approach, but very few have pulled it off. It is, after all, rather bold to assume your player is going to care enough to put as much mental energy as it takes to figure out the lore of an entire fictional world. However, Hyper Light Drifter pulls you in with its evocative visual aesthetic, old school gameplay, and at least for me, its incredible soundtrack courtesy of Fez and It Follows composer Disasterpeace. The game is presented to us with a sense of identity and cohesion most intentionally ambiguous games don’t have, and I found myself wanting to explore further.

8. Titanfall 2

I didn’t play the first Titanfall. It looked alright, but as I said, I’m a campaign/story person, and everything I read about the game told me that it barely had one. So I shrugged and gave nary a thought to Titanfall.

Then Titanfall 2 came out, and all the critics I go to first... loved it.

“Bullshit,” I thought.

They raved about how refined the gameplay was and its surprisingly great campaign.

“Bullshit,” I continued to think.

Weeks after the game came out, some of the previously mentioned critics, who usually don’t buy into AAA promo deal stuff, were out buying packs of Doritos for the double XP.

“Alright fine, universe, you win. I’ll try this game.”

So I bought it and I haven’t been able to stop playing it ever since.

The campaign, as promised, was surprisingly decent. It’s not a particularly well told story, but it does have a lot of great writing in it and it earns its big moments well enough so I can actually say that I cared, particularly about the relationship between… generic white first person shooter protagonist guy and BT, his big hulking robot friend. (As I said, the story isn’t perfect.) On top of that, it was fun to play and it experiments with a bunch of ideas I genuinely hope to see in a theoretical Titanfall 3. (Mainly the time travel elements and the use of terrain.)

But the gameplay is what keeps bringing me back to Titanfall 2. Guys, this game is so fucking fun to play it’s almost intoxicating. The wall running, unlike other shooters, feels incredibly smooth and it transitions to other moves so quickly and effortlessly that it feels like I could keep moving forever. The balance in abilities gives you enough of an advantage, but you’re always vulnerable. You can hop right into a match and you don’t have to suffer the Call of Duty problem of “Everyone who’s playing is already a million times better than me and now I’m frustrated.” Everything you want is here, and while the sales of Titanfall 2 weren’t great, there’s nowhere for this franchise to go but forward.

7. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

I was never a mega fan of the Uncharted series. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great games. It’s just that when people say that Uncharted 2 is one of the greatest games of the previous generation, I have to stick my hands in my pockets and start humming.

For those of you who have never played an Uncharted game, the formula works something like this: Nathan Drake wants to find X HISTORICAL THING with a big payday, but so does a big bad. The two then embark on an Indiana Jones like collision course that usually leads them both to a mythological lost city. (Shambhala and Ubar, for example.) Most of the time, a supernatural force or general weirdness gets unleashed, the villain takes control of it, you kill the villain, and you run from the city as it gets destroyed. There’s a final scene where they’ve recapped what they learned, and the credits roll.

Uncharted 4 follows the formula up to a very specific point. The historical thing is Henry Avery’s stolen treasure from the Gunsway Heist. The lost city is Libertalia, the fabled pirate colony of Madagascar. However Drake isn’t in it for the payday. He’s in it to save his brother and to relive the life he’s left behind.

And there’s no supernatural element. It's the aspect of the franchise that never clicked with me personally. (The exact moment Uncharted 2 lost me was when it introduced the yeti men.) However, I understand why some people missed that element in A Thief's End, and why they expected the full Indiana Jones, holy grails and all.

But Uncharted 4 isn’t a story about “get the big thing before the other guy does something horrible with it.” It’s about a man who thinks he misses the life of being an international treasure hunter. He then sees where that life ends on the faces of his brother and the skeletons in Libertalia, and realizes that he doesn’t want it anymore. He doesn’t need endless roaming and treasure to be happy, and now it’s time to truly move on.

It’s a game about closure, and I can happily say that I got some for myself. As I said, I never liked the Uncharted games to the extent that a lot of people do, but I always enjoyed having them around. If this is indeed the final full game, I’ll miss it. But I’m happy it ended the way it did. So long, Uncharted. Glad to have known you.

6. Oxenfree

Oxenfree is a 2D adventure game about a group of teenagers having their last high school hurrah on an abandoned island that use to house military personnel. We play as Alex, and things haven’t been going great for her as of late. Her brother Michael drowned a few years ago after she made him take her swimming, her parents divorced soon after, and now she’s going to an overnight party with her new stepbrother and Michael’s ex-girlfriend, who very much blames Alex for his death.

Not helping matters is the rift in time the teens accidentally open and the ghostly presence of an exploded WWII era submarine crew that starts possessing them and messing with time.

I didn’t dig as far into the side stuff as I should have, and thus I never really had a complete understanding of the big picture as to what’s going on with the ghosts. But I understand enough. Or at the very least, I understand the general gist and I’m willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt that it was all there and I just needed to look harder.

The one thing I know for sure though is that while the ghost stuff was fantastic, my emotional investment was in the characters. Oxenfree is a game about the lingering emotional baggage of tragedy, and while the teens hide it under layers of sarcasm and humor, there’s clearly something seething under the surface of those affected.

It is fitting then that the story squares them off against a malevolent force suffering under the emotional weight of their sudden death. Alex is a character stuck in a rut from the turmoil in her home, and the ghosts want to take Alex from her emotional loop and put her in a literal one. But then she sees where grief ends. It’s an unavoidable part of life, but left unchecked, it’s a violent force that can lead to madness. You have to return to the world of the living.

I wish certain parts of the story were more clear, but Oxenfree is still a fascinating, heartfelt, and occasionally fucking creepy story you should experience for yourself.

5. Superhot

It baffles the mind how nobody thought of the central mechanic of Superhot earlier. I mean, someone had to have had the idea before, but I’m surprised nobody had thought to implement it in a first person shooter like Superhot did.

The mechanic I speak of is this: Time moves only when you do. Fire a gun, for example, and the bullet will float in mid air until you advance forward, which is when the bullet will do the same. The same is true for the enemies you need to defeat or throwable objects. Thus the shootouts have a bit of a puzzle/strategy element. You have to think about your movements very carefully in order to make it to the next level and think about space, time, and action in a way you never have before.

(In case none of that was clear, here's some gameplay.)

Recorded with Bandicam. Slick DOS-like user interface and cool slo-mo gunplay in SUPERHOT.

Story wise, Superhot goes into interesting, albeit occasionally too-cheeky-for-its-own-good-territory. Essentially, you’re on your fake computer when your fake friend sends you a link to a fake game called “superhot.exe.” You play the game. Time moves only when you do and so on and so forth, and soon enough, you start handing the game more and more control of your literal consciousness until you pretty much download yourself into the matrix.

A little too meta? Maybe. But the game’s sinister sensibility and the way all this information is communicated to you does more than enough to sell it in the moment.

Superhot is a short experience that doesn’t outstay its welcome. It plays beautifully, and I still go back to it frequently and think about it often. I suppose the only thing left to say is what hundreds have said before me: It’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.

4. Abzû

I suppose comparisons to Journey were somewhat inevitable. After all, Abzû was created by the art director of Journey, both games have you explore long forgotten civilizations in a mysteriously told story, and both resulted in me almost violently hurling myself toward my laptop in order to purchase Austin Wintory’s beautiful score.

Though I’ll admit that these games have a lot in common, I barely thought about Journey during my time with Abzû.

Journey has you explore desert environments that get so barren and lonely that when you encounter another player it feels like a ray of sunshine. Abzû, on the other hand, takes the exact opposite approach. Every inch of the ocean you explore in Abzû bursts from the seams with life and vitality, be it the fish accompanying you on your adventure or the flora growing from the sea floor. On top of that, it chooses the best possible moments to remove all the life it builds up so effectively. When it’s gone, you feel its absence.

It’s also a different animal in terms of story and intent. Journey’s story is simple: There’s a light on the top of a mountain. Go to the light and learn what you can about the abandoned civilization on the way. It’s a game that explores death, and it calls on you to project yourself onto it more effectively than possibly any video game that’s come before it. Abzû, on the other hand, tells a more traditional tale. It’s a story that leaves itself open for interpretation, but it has a general framework of “You are a scuba diver with no memory of who you are, and the further you venture into the sea, the more you learn about yourself and what you care about, and you take it upon yourself to stop the malevolent force killing the ocean.”

Abzû is a game about resurrection and life. It’s about our relationship with nature, and our impulses towards destruction. I think in the inevitable/arbitrary Journey vs. Abzû debate, I’d land on team Journey. However, reveling in the beauty of Abzû filled me with a bliss that was more than welcome in 2016, and I loved every second.

3. The Witness

We’ve already talked about The Witness enough. (In vague summary, it changed my attitude about certain elements of not just video games, but art in general.)

I’ll just say this: I’ve found new joys in The Witness as of late. A few weeks after writing my love letter to it, I went back and started playing it again. I think I’m having more actual fun now. I already know how this ends, I remember well enough how certain systems work, and if I can’t figure something out, I’m not putting as much mental pressure on myself to get it done. During my first play through, my attitude was, “You're not going to get up or do anything until you solve this puzzle. Fuck food.” My attitude now is, “Whatever. Hey, let’s go to another area for a while.”

It is possible to engage with this game in a way that I don’t go down a stressful mental rabbit hole. Now I love it even more.

2. Doom

I was expecting a garbage fire.

I think I was born too late to be a proper fan of the Doom franchise and that general style of game. (Though Quake III Arena was a huge part of my childhood.) On top of that, everything that was said about the multiplayer beta and its showing at E3 all pointed to a game that was going to be lackluster at best and complete shit at worst. Then the game came out, and everyone loved it. Some were even getting emotional about the memories Doom brought to the surface, and how excellent a job Id Software did with the single player campaign.

“Bull… shit.” I thought.

From there, the praise only grew, so I finally caved. I bought the game at eleven o’clock and let the game download overnight. The next morning I woke up, and decided I’d give it five minutes before breakfast.

I saw what everyone else saw almost immediately. I couldn’t stop playing.

There’s much to praise about Doom. The way it looks. The way it plays. The way it handles exposition. (“Fuck exposition,” basically.) Its surprisingly well-done story that they were under no obligation to have. Its informative and subtly hilarious codex. How much personality and information the game presents about the silent Doom Slayer using only visual clues. Its brilliant approach to strategy and how the mechanics weave into one another, making you feel every bit like the badass the game treats you as.

However, what makes Doom special is that it’s a game that understands what you want to do, and rewards you for doing it. Need health? Kill demons. Need ammo? Kill demons. Need to progress the story? Kill demons. Need to kill demons? Kill demons.

No restrictions. No deep overly complex web of systems and mechanics to master. Kill demons.

This is a game that loves its player. I've never engaged with the multiplayer or any of the other elements, but during the campaign, I felt like I was playing a game from a group of people who loved what they were making and respected me for playing it. This is how it should be. This is how I should feel. This is the standard.

1. Inside

As far as arbitrary pop culture debates I’ve had in my head go, the Doom vs. Inside debate is one of the more ferocious I’ve ever had to have with myself. I started work on these lists in the beginning of December, and I constantly shifted back and forth between where in this list these two games should go.

In the end, however, I went with Inside for one simple reason: Doom may represent what games should be, but Inside represents what they could be beyond that. Doom is a video game ass video game, and the joy to be felt from playing it stays in the confines of the medium. Inside feels like something bigger.

But here’s the thing: Now I have to describe the experience of playing Inside, and I’m not quite sure how the fuck I’m supposed to convey that with mere words. If there’s one vague term you can use to describe Inside, that term would be “evocative.” Using a combination of German expressionism and retrofuturism, Inside presents you with one of the most oppressive worlds in video game history, and yet it’s a world so intriguing and fraught with mystery that you can’t help but dig further and further. You feel every inch of the world, and it’s not an experience you’re going to immediately be able shake off.

I know that I should describe the story, but I don't know how to do that. I know I should say more about this game, but I honestly think that if you’re going to play it, which you should, you're better off knowing as little as possible. I know it’s lame to declare this my favorite game of the year and not really explain why. But if you've played it, you already have an opinion. If you haven't, then all I can say is that I wish I knew less going into it my first time, and I don't want to pass my mistakes onto others.

I’ll guess I’ll sum up by saying this: Inside is the game that I felt the most this year. It didn’t make me feel particularly good, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience quite like it.

Honorable Mentions:

Firewatch
No Man’s Sky (What with the fiasco around No Man’s Sky, I feel duty bound to explain myself a little. My time with No Man’s Sky lasted about two weeks. During those two weeks, I was moving, and I was constantly stressed out and miserable. Thus, when I finally sat down after a long day’s bullshit-ery, nothing on this earth was more relaxing than the pure simplicity and solitude of No Man’s Sky. I then moved, and when the work was done, I never touched it again. I always realized that it wasn’t a great game, and I understand the reaction. But I have a soft spot for it, and I think it got way more shit than it actually deserved.)
Reigns
That Dragon, Cancer
Virginia

Wish I Played:

Episode four of Kentucky Route Zero (I’ve played the first three episodes. I decided that I’m going to wait for the last episode to come out, then play the whole thing when they’re all available. But I love Kentucky Route Zero.)
Hitman (I almost put Hitman on this list because I’ve spent so much time this year watching others play it than I've developed a weird attachment to it. But I realized that wasn’t fair. But I will play Hitman in 2017 if it kills me.)
The Last Guardian
Mafia III
Overwatch (When I said, "A few massive holes in the list of games I played this year," this is specifically what I was talking about.)
Owlboy
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series - A New Frontier (Waiting until all the episodes are out. Season one, well... let's just say I feel strongly about it.)
Watch Dogs 2 (Hated the first Watch Dogs, or Watch_Dogs or whatever. But I would love to play a version of that game that knows how dumb it is.)

Movies

A summary of 2016 in film: It was shit. Then it very abruptly wasn’t.

Alright fine, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, so let’s get into some specifics. The films released from January through September were… mostly shit. Don’t get me wrong, there was a good release once in a while. In fact, four of those releases made this list, and one of them even took my number one spot. However, for me, a great year in film strikes a balance between great independent films and great blockbusters, and of those four films, only one of them had a wide release. This is my indirect logically fallacious way of saying that I did not find balance in 2016.

Then October rolled around, and with it the fresh smell of Oscar season. My first three Oscar season films were Sully, American Honey, and Birth of a Nation. Though I’m lukewarm on the first two and flat out dislike the third, I can’t describe any of them as "boring." I kicked off last year with The Walk. You can see why I can't help but think that things improved.

Then I saw Moonlight, and despite a few bumps in the road, it’s been smooth sailing ever since. In fact, I think this might be one of the more interesting Oscars seasons in recent memory.

For film, like a lot of 2016, it was a year where the peaks were stunningly high and the valleys seemed bottomless until you threw a brick in and heard a thud and the shattering of a Suicide Squad blu-ray. (Another indirect way of saying Suicide Squad was the worst movie of the year.) I left this year feeling somewhat uneasy about this film industry of mine. There was, after all, a lot of junk and failure and some bad trends will continue. However, I looked at this list once I completed it, and I thought to myself, “You know what? These are some fucking great movies.” And then I felt much better.

Hey. List making can be therapeutic provided you don’t take it too seriously.

Runner-Up: Arrival

I read the script for Arrival back when it was called Story of Your Life. On the whole, I liked the script a lot, but I can’t say I actually enjoyed the act of reading it. The unfortunate downside of certain kinds of high concept films is that you have to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining everything so the audience can keep up, and Arrival is no different. You also have to imagine what it’s like to read the visual flashbacks/forwards with her daughter, as opposed to actually seeing them. Still, I walked away from the script thinking that in the right hands, it could be a great movie.

So when I found out Villeneuve was directing, I was over the moon.

It’s still exposition heavy, but again, that’s an unavoidable part of a this kind of story. Other than that, the team that made this film nailed every emotional beat the story has to offer, and the changes the movie made from the script made it a better experience on the whole. (The original ending: Through using her newly understood ability to see into the future, she discovers that the heptapods are trying to give them blueprints to a ship to take the human race to a new planet once the earth dies out. The movie’s ending is better.)

There’s really only one issue I have that kept Arrival off the list. I’ve had a little bit of trouble describing it, so bear with me a little. I understood from my first read through that her daughter is what leads to the realization that she can see into the future, and thus she has to choose between saving the world and letting her future daughter die or the other way around. I just wish that the story was plotted in such a way as to emphasize the moment where she makes that choice.

I do believe that moment is there. It just seemed to me that she made the decision quickly and the gravity of it wasn’t given enough time to sink in before she made it. (That said, I’m relying on my memory, and I might feel differently when I see it again. For what it’s worth, I saw it twice in theaters.)

Still, Arrival is a beautiful movie about communication. It’s about how we engage, and how we can make actual progress if we learn how to communicate with one another. It’s also about perceptions, and how you view the world through the lens that is “you.” There is, of course, beauty in that. Others perceive stimuli different than you do, and thus they might have a perspective that’s vital to your life and how you live it. You may be able to do the same for someone else. But the fact that you perceive the world in a unique way can also feed into the worst parts of your personality. The parts that want to harm.

The only option is to try to think outside of yourself. It might save the world.

10. Zootopia

Disney had a hell of a year, didn’t they?

Sure there’s the massive amounts of revenue drawn in from Disney’s various subsidiaries, (Pixar, Marvel, etc.) as well as the core Disney films themselves. (Here’s a pretty good breakdown of how 2016 went, money wise.) However, I’m speaking from more of a creative standpoint. I saw eight of the thirteen Disney/Disney owned films released this year. Of those eight, five of them are genuinely great films and the other three are flawed but generally decent movies that are worth your time. None of them are outright bad.

Zootopia was my favorite movie of the bunch, and very well might be one of my favorite Disney movies in recent memory. It has all the markings of a classic Disney film (well told story, stunning visuals, etc.), but there are two elements of it that elevate Zootopia beyond most of the films I saw in 2016.

The first is the world of Zootopia itself, and specifically, its titular city. The film romanticizes Zootopia from the very first scene, and the script does an effective job building the city up as this bastion of culture and progress. Judy works hard to get there, and it is indeed everything she was promised.

But it’s also a city wrought with poverty, prejudice, corruption, and civil abuse. Though it’s a place where everyone can live together, there’s still an entrenched fear in the way its citizens interact with one another. It's almost a little too tangible for its own good.

The other element is protagonist Judy Hopps, who I feel confident in saying is one of my favorite Disney protagonists to date. Sure, she has a lot in common with those who came before her. She’s passionate, energetic, “spunky” if we want to use language with connotations I’m not crazy about. However, beneath her enthusiasm is a very real layer of vulnerability. One of my favorite parts of the movie is the scene where she goes home after her first day as a cop, tired and defeated, and prepares a pathetic microwaveable dinner before trying to convince her parents that everything’s going alright. It's one of the most relatable scenes in the whole movie.

Moreover though, she begins to understand that she isn’t above the elements of life in Zootopia that she abhors the most. She thinks she isn’t prejudiced, but there’s still a part of her that turns to fear whenever there’s a predator around. Rather than most Americans, however, she learns to understand that part of herself, and she decides to make a change. Of course, real life isn’t as simple. But growth is possible. It just takes work, and you have to try.

9. Paterson

Ever wanted to know how introverts think? Watch Paterson.

Ok, it’s not quite the same thing. Paterson, our protagonist and resident bus driver of Paterson, New Jersey, is a veteran. I don’t think he shows any signs of flat out trauma, but his experiences have clearly had some effect on him. He takes comfort in his routine, and whenever something breaks it, we can sense a small amount of fright in him. He knows how to effectively disarm someone, but panics only after he’s done so. There’s a scene later where his bus breaks down, and he has a noticeable reaction every time someone brings up the prospect of the bus catching on fire or exploding.

Yet, I see a lot of my own behavior and thought processes reflected in Paterson, and the only combat I’ve seen is the occasional childhood fistfight with my brother. There’s a small scene a little before the halfway mark (I think) that's easy to miss where Paterson walks into the bus depot and takes a quick mental note of the brickwork of the building. It’s never made explicitly clear what specifically stood out or why. It’s just something that caught his attention because of the way he perceives the world around him. I do the same thing all the time. You probably do so yourself.

Paterson and I are also quiet people, but unlike myself, Paterson surrounds himself with those who express themselves loudly and... often. His wife Laura has a flighty but artistic spirit that abounds from her and spreads to everything she touches, mostly via black and white paint. Her dresses. Their shower curtains. The cabinets. The guitar she buys. Everything. His co-worker Donny constantly wants to tell Paterson about his problems at home. At night, he goes to a bar, where a man named Everett can’t stop telling his ex Marie about how much he loves her and wants her back.

Everyone in his life overflows with thoughts and feelings they want to share, but Paterson himself remains mostly quiet. His only real form of expression is through a small notebook he keeps on his person throughout most of the day where he writes poetry. Paterson’s poems, mostly inspired by his wife, are surprisingly vivid and profound. The smallest things we don’t think about, like a box of matches, inspire Paterson with new ways to express how much he loves Laura. If they aren’t about her, they’re about the world and how things affect him. He doesn’t say much out loud, but he feels deeply.

We watch a week of Paterson’s life go by. The more time we spend with him, the more we get to know the couple at the center through Paterson's eyes. They have opposite personalities and though he never says so out loud, there are times when she clearly annoys him.

But through his poems, we learn his love for her is boundless.

8. Elle

After I saw Elle, I spent the next few weeks trying to figure out why it works, because it really shouldn’t. It’s a competently made film. The story’s structured well, it looks fantastic, Isabelle Huppert gives what very well might be the best performance of the year. All the boxes on the “good movie” checklist get a tick. However, none of it should work for one simple reason: The premise of Elle, as well as the mere fact it exists, is fucking psychotic. The fact that it’s a great movie is even more so.

For those of you who’ve never seen it, here’s a basic rundown: Michèle gets raped in her house by a masked assailant, and then acts like nothing happened. (If I remember correctly, she orders Chinese.) The next morning, she goes to her job as the head of a video game studio where they’re working on the sequel to their big fantasy franchise, and she continues to act like nothing happened. The only change in her demeanor is that she now views the people in her life with a new level of suspicion. There’s her son, who won’t leave his domineering girlfriend despite her being pregnant with someone else’s child. There’s the caustic programmer constantly challenging her. There’s her best friend’s husband with whom she’s having an affair. There’s her narcissistic mother. There’s her religious neighbor with her handsome husband. And on top of all that, there’s her father: An infamous serial killer who’s made her and her family famous and loathed.

Eventually, she finds out who raped her and sets in motion her plan for revenge, and what develops is the most fucked up… I guess you’d have to call it a “relationship” ever. Also, this movie’s directed by the guy who did Showgirls.

I did finally figure out why it worked, but unfortunately, there’s a way to flip it in a manner I don’t mean. So let me get it out of the way: No, Michèle isn’t “asking for it,” her rape is not her fault, and nobody deserves to be raped under any circumstances whatsoever. There are moral absolutes. This is one of them.

Elle works because it does a masterful job showing you how people get pulled into Michèle’s wake. She walked away from her childhood with a sense of drive and an ultra resilient personality, but she also has a darkness to her and she’s fascinated by morbidity. As such, she’s attracted to those with similar defects, and she’s corrosive to all the people in her life who don’t. (For example, it’s not hard to see what her son finds so attractive about his girlfriend.)

Michèle begins to understand this aspect of herself, and we watch her become disillusioned by the way she’s been living her life up to this point. I think she believes that she “deserved” (for lack of a better word) to be raped because of the darker aspects of her personality and actions. However, she begins to understand why that isn’t true.

It's not a movie for everyone. It has no clear answers or stances, and it deals entirely in shades of gray. It's an incredibly bizarre movie, and if you hate it, I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong. But it worked for me, and I still have trouble believing it.

7. The Handmaiden

Speaking of bizarre…

2016 was a fascinating year in directing. This was a year, for better or for worse, of singular vision and a lot of movies with the feeling that nobody else could’ve made them other than their directors, and nobody else should’ve tried. Arrival is an example of what I’m talking about, as well as La La Land and Elle and a few other movies we’ll be talking about later in this list.

Indeed, this was a very auteur-y year, and The Handmaiden is one of the better examples of this sort of comeback. Like Elle, The Handmaiden shouldn’t work. There are abrupt changes in tone, it gleefully shifts in genre at will, and most of all, the story is completely ridiculous.

Thank god then that this is a Park Chan-wook production. For those of you unfamiliar with Park Chan-wook, he’s the director behind the original Oldboy, as well as other fantastic movies such as J.S.A.: Joint Security Area, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, its spiritual sequel Lady Vengeance, and a few other movies that are absolutely worth your time. All of his films share similar tonal qualities as The Handmaiden, and Park is a master at making this style sing. In fact, The Handmaiden might be the most Park Chan-wook movie that Park Chan-wook has made to date.

All of this is to say that The Handmaiden is a different species of strange than Elle. It tells its story in three chapters. On the bonkers meter that I keep in my head that measures weirdness, the first chapter is at around a two or three. Chapter two immediately hikes it up to a seven with the introduction of sex mannequins and early Japanese porn and erotica. Then chapter three ratchets it up to a ten, what with the octopus and the finger severing.

As you may have gathered, The Handmaiden, if nothing else, is unbelievably entertaining. The story, about a duo of con artists trying to seduce a woman into marriage to steal her inheritance after having her committed, constantly subverts your expectations as it heads into stranger and stranger territory. Park injects his sense of jet black humor into every scene that calls for it, but he also knows when to hold back. It’s a movie that knows how silly it is, and milks every bit of it.

It’s also, in the end, a story about love and redemption. You aren’t fated to be a con artist forever, nor should you tolerate a life you feel trapped into living. In between the craziness of The Handmaiden lies a surprising depth and profundity, and I can’t wait to watch it again.

6. O.J.: Made in America

Before we go any further, a quick note on the whole “is it a TV show or a film” debate. As you can probably tell from its placement on this list, I consider it a movie. Though I watched it episodically as a 30 for 30 series, it did run in theaters and director Ezra Edelman considers it one piece cut up into parts. Above all else, however, I think this documentary works better as a cohesive whole seen all at once than I do as five parts. Sure, that means a considerable runtime (about eight hours) but this is a story about everything that led to the murder, and to put it in The Wire parlance, all the pieces matter.

Now, when we talk about the catastrophe that is the life of O.J. Simpson, a lot of details fall through the cracks. Mostly, we talk about the big famous sports star who murdered his wife, went on the run, stunned the world with a shocking verdict, and spent the rest of his life to this date flushing his second chance down the toilet. Though we occasionally talk about the racial component, we mostly discuss the massive all encompassing clusterfuck around the trial before we all but dismiss it as “just another thing that happened.”

I’ve said this before, but I want to elaborate. The FX show made me realize that the trial was interesting, but O.J.: Made in America made me realize that it was a historical event of real significance. It’s when white America finally took notice of the failures of our justice system. It’s when a lot of America in general realized that the racial divides in this country go beyond two races that don’t have a lot in common. That they have a fundamentally different idea as to what this country of ours means and how it should operate.

More importantly, however, O.J.: Made in America uses its length to add more depth to the human beings sucked into the O.J.'s vortex. Specifically, at some point during the opening hours, it occurred to me that I knew absolutely nothing about Nicole other than the fact that she was murdered by a rich football player. I didn’t know that she was a woman of remarkable grace who made a life with a monster who abused her. I didn’t know much about Ronald Goldman either. Now I do.

The person I didn’t know the most about, however, was the man himself. We get so lost in the celebrity of O.J. Simpson that we lose track of the person underneath. It seems to me that O.J. was a man who never felt at peace with his own race, and did everything possible to distance himself from anything other than being a rich celebrity. I think one can make the case that he was mentally ill, though still capable of telling right and wrong. I also think he’s the product of generations of racism, and while that excuses nothing, it at least explains to me how his path was possible.

O.J.: Made in America is stunning in its thoroughness. It understands that someone like O.J. could never have come from nowhere, and thus seeks to explore every nook and cranny of his life, even going into such details as the history of the schools he attended to the neighborhoods where he lived. It also seeks to understand the country that elevated him to god like status, and what it says about ourselves.

5. Green Room

I grew up in the suburbs of DC in Virginia, a city with a rich past in punk rock. I've listened to plenty of DC punk before, and I still do to this day. This is, after all, the city that birthed Fugazi and Bad Brains. However, I've never been to a show, and if it weren't for the internet, I may have gone my whole life without ever knowing where these bands came from.

Not that going to a show and seeing a movie are the same thing, but after Green Room, I felt like I had been to a punk show. I was sweaty, I just experienced something visceral, and I felt like I just had my teeth kicked in.

We meet our band, The Ain’t Rights, waking up in the van that they live out of. On the surface, they walk the walk. They get by through stealing gas and playing hole in the wall venues during the day. However, though they do genuinely love the music and the life style, there's implications that they come from the kind of privileged backgrounds the punk scene usually abhors and if they wanted to, they could leave it all behind consequence free.

I mention all this because I think the members of the band come from a similar background as myself. They're all from Arlington, VA, and I grew up in a neighborhood right next door. (I drove through Arlington every day to get to school.) Furthermore, I saw Blue Ruin, director Jeremy Saulnier’s previous fantastic and bloody as hell film, before Green Room. Thus, when they enter the skinhead bar, I immediately began to feel on edge. Part of it was because I was nervous for the characters and had an idea as to what was about to happen. But mostly it’s because I felt like I was personally in that bar. And I didn’t belong.

When shit finally goes down, each member of the band reveals their true selves. Some live up their punk image. Some aren’t so strong. But it feels like roughly what would happen if you actually put those people in that situation. There’s no action movie heroics. Just bad decision making, blood, and bone.

Green Room is a brutal movie. It isn’t an intellectually stimulating movie like a few of the films that have come before on this list. (That's actually not true at all, but you get what I mean.) Rather Green Room is a movie you feel in your guts. It’s the energy of punk rock channeled into a pure struggle for survival. It is also, to put it delicately, completely fucked.

Rest in peace Anton Yelchin. You’ve done great work, and you’ll be dearly missed.

4. Manchester by the Sea

Pick up your favorite screenwriting textbook or your copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces or whatever text about mythology and storytelling you so desire. They’ll be differences in terms and concepts, but they’re all going to fundamentally tell you the same thing: Heroes go full circle. They venture into foreign lands in search of their heart’s desire, and they return having gained new perspective. Frodo Baggins wants to destroy a ring, and he comes home with a new worldly perspective, knowing he’s a part of something bigger than himself. Simba wants to atone for the role he thinks he played in his father’s death. He eventually comes home a king. Trauma gets inflicted, but heroes always overcome.

But there are some things you simply don’t come back from.

As I’ve said before, the reason we like stories so much is because they make our problems seem solvable. And not just the problems immediately in front of you. It isn't enough to shoot a skinhead or fall in love with a rich widow or solve a crime with your fox friend. Good stories also involve characters battling with their subconscious. Their depression or their sense of loss or whatever defects of their personality that hold them back. You have to change yourself to fight the ultimate fight, but it’s doable and worth it.

But what if something so unfathomably horrible happened to you that nobody expects you to recover, and in your heart of hearts, you know you don’t stand a chance? What if, like Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea, your three children died in a fire you caused and you’ve got nothing to live for? Can you overcome?

The answer, for Lee Chandler at least, is no. But he tries.

Manchester by the Sea works because it isn’t a traditional story about someone who overcomes his problems. It’s a display of raw humanity about a man trying like hell to defeat his inner demons, and ultimately failing. That’s how trauma works. You don’t “get over it.” It changes who you are and what you care about. Some walk away from their experiences capable of change. Some don’t, and that’s ultimately what makes Manchester by the Sea so utterly devastating. We want him to get better. We want him to move in with his nephew in Manchester and be part of a happy family.

But he can’t beat it.

3. Moonlight

Look. I’m a screenwritin’ man. Whenever there’s a great film, my initial impulse is to give all the credit to the writers and scoff at anyone who insists otherwise. Despite my pettiness, however, know that I understand how and why that isn’t the case. In truth, hundreds of people are responsible for making a film great, and they all deserve credit. I still think screenwriters maybe deserve more credit than others, but in the end, everything falls on the director.

“Good directing” is a vast nebulous term that can get a little difficult to describe. I think a lot of people who don’t know about film production think that the director’s job is actually that of the director of photography. (I know I thought that for a long long time.) I also believe a lot of people think the director’s job is exclusively to work with the actors, which is, again, an understandable perception. My definition of the director’s job is to fully realize a vision of the final product that people will eventually see. That means his/her/whatever pronoun’s job means dabbling in every part of the film to steer it in a particular direction. Sometimes, it’s the director's own. Sometimes it’s the studio’s. But in either case, the director sees the product through to the finish line. Or at least they should.

To explain, let’s take Moonlight. Now, I’ve never read the Moonlight script, so I can’t say for sure. However, I think if one were to read Moonlight as a screenplay as opposed to seeing it, I think you’d still understand that it’s a story about black masculinity and trying to forge an emotional connection in a society where you’re pressured to constantly deny that aspect of yourself. You’d read something along the lines of “Kevin gazes into Chiron’s eyes.” But I don’t think you’d feel it.

That’s the director’s job, and in that regard, I think Moonlight is the best directed film of 2016.

Visually, every frame of Moonlight is pure bliss. The acting is some of the best of the year. It’s paced methodically and gives each beat room to breathe. It explores its themes with a deft visual style, and it never preaches or tries to hit you over the head with a “message.” Of course, not all of this was Barry Jenkins, but Moonlight seems so much like the product of a singular vision that it’s hard not to grovel at the man’s feet.

In the end, Jenkins uses his vision to tell a story of astounding beauty and humanity. I felt every moment of Moonlight to my core. From the yearning Chiron and Kevin have for each other, to the frustration Chiron feels trying not to admit to himself that he’s gay, to the weight of every one of his mother’s words. I felt every bit of this movie, and that’s a testament to the power of a great director.

As I write this, the Oscar nominations will be announced in a week. Not that the Oscars matter, and indeed I’m a little ashamed at myself for turning to them in this Moonlight summary, but I hope Moonlight sweeps. And even if it doesn’t win a single award or even earn a single nomination, I genuinely believe with all of my heart that we’ll still be talking about Moonlight years from now. I think it’ll go down as one of those movies.

2. I Am Not Your Negro

In the weeks after the election, I felt unbelievably low. So I did what I always do when I feel this way, which is to dive head first into the arts. Movies. TV. Video games. Music. Whatever I can find. In this case, Oscar season was starting to ramp up, and thus I was going around to all the theaters and watching all the Oscar movies early in limited release. (The one advantage of living in Los Angeles. The one.) So one night, I saw that I Am Not Your Negro was playing at a theater in Baldwin Hills. I knew little about it, other than the praise and the general outline of it being about James Baldwin and Remember the House, the manuscript he was working on before he died.

Still, I decided to see it anyway, because James Baldwin is one of my favorite writers of all time. My first exposure to his work was in high school. I didn’t appreciate him then. I don’t know why. Maybe it was something as simple as being in a shitty teenage mood, but I try to remember what it was and I simply cannot. Then I read him again in college, specifically freshman year. I was taking a class about the trajectories of African American and Russian literature (serfs and slaves, etc.), and we had to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Much like the first time I read it, I deeply hated it. But I had trouble understanding why. Shortly afterwards, I read an essay by Baldwin called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which he says the following about Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.”

This one paragraph changed how I view art. This is what made me realize why I always felt such an aversion to sentimentality. I started consuming Baldwin’s work, and I grew forever envious of Baldwin’s ability to express himself. At the time, I was beginning to find my voice as a screenwriter. After reading this paragraph, I thought to myself, “If I can ever express myself through my work half as well Baldwin can, I’ll consider my life well lived.”

In Remember the House, and thus by extension I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin turns his unendingly insightful eye towards race relations in America by specifically talking about three great men: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. In the documentary, or to be more accurate, in this non-fiction piece, Samuel L. Jackson (toning down his persona to an unrecognizable degree) reads the unfinished manuscript over relevant footage and photos, including that of the civil rights movement and the protests happening now. The film also cuts in footage of Baldwin’s various interviews, where he speaks on race and society.

Unfortunately, I’m relying on memory here. When possible, I tried to rewatch a little bit of each movie on this list to remind myself of how I felt, and to maybe make a specific point or two. As I write this, I don’t have access to I Am Not Your Negro, and I can’t remember any of Baldwin’s writings or quotes in the exactitude they deserve. But I swear to you that everything he writes and says sounds like he looked into the future and saw what’s become of us, and he pre-channeled our pain into his words. It is simply breathtaking.

Despite the sobering effect I Am Not Your Negro can have, I left the theater feeling inspired. Somewhere, there’s a mind like James Baldwin's. A mind that can express our despair and give us insight into how to confront the darkness. Once the orange fog lifts, people like Baldwin will lead us into the future. People of remarkable wisdom and love. People of color. People unburdened by the old rules of gender. People of all spectrums of sexualities.

More than anything now, I want to see the world the Baldwins of the future create for us.

And actually, I do “remember” one quote:

“The question you have got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South, because it's one country, and for a Negro, there's no difference between the North and South. There's just a difference in the way they castrate you. But the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I'm not a nigger here and you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it's able to ask that question.”

1. Embrace of the Serpent

Dumb point I have to make first: I’m still not entirely sure Embrace of the Serpent counts as a 2016 film. It was released in its native home of Columbia in 2015, which is when it also premiered at festivals and such, and it was nominated for the best foreign picture Oscar last year. However, it had a limited release in the States in 2016, which is when I saw it in theaters. More importantly though, as you probably ascertained from it being number one on my list, I feel more passionately about it than anything I saw in 2016. So it counts, damn it!

Now then.

It’s 1909. Karamakate lives in the heart of the Amazon. Despite his young age, he’s the last surviving member of his tribe. Everything that ever was and ever will be of his people rests with him. One day, a sick German scientist and a westernized local he saved from a rubber plantation find Karamakate at his home. They ask him to help them find a rare plant called the Yakruna, a sacred plant which supposedly possesses healing powers. Reluctantly, he agrees, and the group proceed to boat down the river. Along the way, they experience the effects of the continued European intrusion into the Amazon.

A few decades later, another white man finds Karamakate, now an old man starting to forget the ways of his tribe. This white man is from America, and he’s read the account of the German scientist from 1909. He also wants to find the Yakruna. Karamakate doesn’t remember how to find it anymore, but he agrees to help. They use the German scientist’s book as a guide, and along the way, they see some of the consequences of the first trek. For example, during the first journey, the stumble upon a Catholic Mission ran by a horrid priest. They wind up killing him. When Karamakate visits again with the American, it turns out the children who lived in the Mission never left, and now they worship a cult leader. The religion they practice seems to be a bizarre combination of Christianity, tribal religions of which I unfortunately don’t know enough about, and, well, bizarre cult nonsense.

Embrace of the Serpent is about the destruction of a way of life. It paints the devastation in broad strokes, but the actions that lead to the end of an entire culture aren’t subtle. A group of white men go someplace they don’t belong, they take what they want, and they don’t bother trying to understand the new world they’ve entered or the people that inhabit it.

Yet, none of the white men in Embrace of the Serpent twirl their mustaches. There is no evil scheme or grand plans for destruction. The only thing in their hearts is want. The German scientist wants a cure for his sickness. It’s eventually revealed that the American wants to find new trees to help produce rubber. Both are compromised by the cultures they come from, and both see only a means to an end. Everything in their way is forfeit.

In the end, one of the white men finally finds the plant. Once he consumes it, he has a vivid hallucination and sees things he’s never seen before. He then wakes up and Karamakate’s gone. The white man gets what he wants, and the indigenous man and his people disappear forever.

Though I saw Embrace of the Serpent well before the election, it has taught me more about where I live and how I got here than I ever thought I could know.

Honorable Mentions:

Amanda Knox
April and the Extraordinary World
Cameraperson
Christine
The Edge of Seventeen
Everybody Wants Some!!
Finding Dory (As someone who never liked the first movie as much as everybody else did, I think I have more appreciation for Finding Dory than most. We can get into it later.)
Hell or High Water
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Jackie
Kate Plays Christine
Kubo & The Two Strings
La La Land
Moana
Silence
Sing Street
Things to Come
Toni Erdmann
Tower
Weiner
The Witch
10 Cloverfield Lane
20th Century Women

Wish I’d Seen:

A Bigger Splash
I, Daniel Blake
Land of Mine
Louder Than Bombs
The Red Turtle
Right Now, Wrong Then

TV

Peak TV stay peakin’, don’t it? In fact, it’s peakin’ so much that this is the first year I convinced myself not to feel like shit for not having seen everything. There is simply too much great television, and seeing all of it is a recreational impossibility.

But I did see a hell of a lot, and this was a hell of a year for television. It was a year of experimentation with both content and distribution that actually seemed to pay off. It was a year of stunning debuts and things we’ve never seen before. It was a year where shows that were already great got even better.

Most importantly though, 2016 for television felt like a year of actual progress. We explored thematic waters in a new depth I don’t feel like we have before: The nuances of racial identity in America, as well as the identities of women or anyone who isn’t a straight white male. The immeasurable holes in our justice system, and what they mean for those who live as its subjects. The simple day-to-day lives of those who live with traumas we couldn’t ever comprehend.

My only hope is that we continue to explore even further.

Runner-Up: Insecure

Let’s talk about Molly for a second.

In episode six of Insecure’s debut season, Molly starts seeing a guy named Jared. After a few romps in the hay, they swap stories about their younger days. Molly tells Jared all about being in college and doing coke and having a sapphic experience or two with her fellow classmates. It’s all laughs until Jared tells her about the time he gave another man a blowjob. Molly freaks out. She goes to her friends. Issa isn’t sure why she should care, but her other friend immediately labels him gay and tells her to dump him. Though she puts up a minimal effort to fight her impulses, she eventually succumbs, and that’s good riddance to another one.

On one hand, I respect the show so much for knowingly having one of its lead characters make such an unlikeable decision. We have a tolerance for unlikeable characters in dramas that we don’t have for comedies. I’ve never really understood why we draw this line in the sand (Hey, article idea!), but we do, and to knowingly cross that line and potentially sacrifice your audience’s investment in a character is a brave creative choice.

On the other hand, the problem with making characters unlikeable is that, well... I no longer like them. I’m aware the show is trying to address homophobia in certain pockets of society. I’m aware that the show isn’t condoning Molly’s actions, and all this is feeding into her season long arc of repeating cycles of self-destruction. Or to put it simply, I’m aware of what the show is trying to do with her.

But I can’t bring myself to feel any sympathy for her. “I am what I am because of how I was raised” isn’t an argument that holds up when you’re a nuanced human being with a conscience. It’s one thing to be ignorant. It’s another thing to try to defend yourself ignorance, and to hurt others in the process.

I mention all this because it casts a fairly large shadow over an otherwise fantastic show. I actually gravitated more towards the show when it took on bigger emotional and political topics than I did the pure relationship drama. But it’s a show with a unparalleled voice, and I hope to see it further developed next season.

Favorite Episodes: “Insecure As Fuck,” “Racist As Fuck,” “Broken As Fuck”

10. Better Things

On paper, Better Things sounds like the most played out premise on the face of the earth. “A single parent takes care of her three kids while trying to balance her professional and personal life.” One wouldn’t need to think too hard to remember a show they’ve watched with a similar set-up.

But Better Things is more than it seems. Much much more. In fact, here’s a list of just some of the topics that Better Things tackled during its first season:

1. The differences in aggressive male behavior throughout different generations.

2. Realizing you may have compromised your future by chasing fleeting pleasure in the present.

3. Interracial dating.

4. The impulse to try to cope with your problems by going further down the rabbit hole of said problems.

5. How to process your feelings when your daughter might be transgendered and you’re not sure how to help her.

I could go on for a very very long time, and that’s ultimately what’s so special about Better Things. It’s a show that’s incredibly soft spoken about its central themes, and rather than beat you over the head with them, it lets you fill in the blanks.

Let us take a sequence from the Better Things finale, “Only Women Bleed.” The episode begins with Sam being shitty to her mom. She promises her a big weekend beach trip, but then backs out at the last minute because she’s not in the mood. We soon roll into the sequence. Sam, our protagonist, gets a text from the mystery man she’s been texting all season. He wants a photo. Sam tries to send him one, but she’s immediately met with pure chaos. Sam’s middle daughter Frankie needs older clothes for a school project. Her oldest, Max, is mad at Frankie for going through her closet. Her youngest, Duke, is pretending to be ill. The maid shows up, but she’s too sick to work. More people come. More people go. She tries to get her photo during the chaos, but it doesn’t happen. Finally, everyone’s gone, and there's silence. She wants to take the picture, but she doesn’t have anything left.

The show never says “The desire to play the role of a mother while also trying to be a good daughter or an engaged sexual partner or any other role a woman has to play that this straight white male blogger cannot comprehend with his lizard brain can be crushing.” Hell, it's entirely possible to watch the sequence and take away something totally different.

That's the beauty of Better Things. Rather than painting its themes in broad strokes, it gently suggests them in the small moments of pathos and humor. I’m sure everyone involved in the making of Better Things is sick of hearing about how “subtle” their show is all the time, but this is some of the best executed subtle television I’ve seen in years. It doesn’t have the same visceral impact as much of the shows on this list, but it still has much to offer, and it was a definite highlight of my week.

Favorite Episodes: “Brown,” “Alarms,” “Only Women Bleed”

9. Mr. Robot

I understand the second season's critical backlash. In fact, I was with them for a while. Whereas the plot of season one moved a million miles per minute, it seemed to me that season two was spending way too much time preparing to get Elliot back into the fold rather than actually doing it.

But then I had a realization. I think it was somewhere between Angela’s "heist" sequence and Elliot’s journey into Word Up Wednesday. I realized that though we weren't even halfway through the season yet, I had a much more nuanced understanding of these characters and the relationship I have with them. I began to understand the depths of Elliot’s delusional worldview in his self-indulgent religious rants and his interactions with Mr. Robot himself. It was the first time I truly realized that I shouldn’t trust him.

I used to see Angela as a doormat, and I think she did too, because most of Angela’s actions this year speak to someone with thick skin willing to go to great depths to get what she wants. Darlene went from prickly hacker to broken down leader willing to make the hardest calls imaginable. Whiterose revealed more of her eccentricities and thought processes during her power struggle with Philip Price. (Note: At this moment in time, I think the proper pronoun for Whiterose is “her,” but I don’t know for sure.) I could go on and on.

Even new characters feel just as lived in, particularly Dom, played by the always fantastic Grace Gummer. Dom is a brilliant FBI agent, but she’s also incredibly lonely, more than likely suffers from depression, and she's fighting a losing battle to get her fellow agents to care about tracking down the Dark Army and fSociety. I found myself rooting for her just as hard as a root for everyone else on this show.

Season two of Mr. Robot is about the characters rather than the plot. Yes, the story as a whole suffered as a result, but I care about these people much more now than I did at the end of season one. Hopefully, season three of Mr. Robot will be more of a marriage of plot and character development. But I’ll happily follow this show wherever it goes.

(Side note: I did not guess the twist. I read the rumor on the internet, and I dismissed it right off the bat. But the further into the season we got, the more it started to make sense. I didn’t like it on paper, but the way it’s executed sells it in the moment. I hope season three leans away from the twist oriented stuff, but you never know. Do you, Mr. Robot. Do you.)

Favorite Episodes: “eps2.2_init_1.asec,” “eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes,” “eps2.5_h4ndshake.sme”

8. You’re The Worst

Season two of You’re The Worst was about everybody realizing what their priorities are, and in order to satisfy them, they have to actually get better rather than just telling themselves they are over and over again. Season three is about actually putting the work in.

Surprisingly enough, everyone gets a little better. Gretchen’s harrowing plummet into her clinical depression last season results in healthy progress with her new therapist. Jimmy’s relationship with his family faces the ultimate test when his father dies, and he questions every decision he’s made that led him to this point in his life. But in the end, he chooses commitment. (Or at least he does at first.) Edgar finds a way to cope with his PTSD after his struggle reaches new terrifying lows. Paul finally realizes how destructive his wife is, and finally gathers the strength to leave her. Lindsay realizes she wants to be her own person, and though she ends the season single and living in a shitty apartment, she’s happy.

But here’s the thing about improving yourself: New issues are going to bubble to the surface. The human personality is imperfect by design. Working on one problem shifts your attention away from another, and the cycle is endless. Gretchen has avenues to turn to for her depression, but now she has to worry about the future. Jimmy decides he wants to commit to Gretchen, but then she brings up Jimmy’s trigger word, “family,” and he drives off after his proposal. Edgar finds a way to cope with his PTSD, but it effectively costs him his relationship with Dorothy. (Who will be missed if she’s permanently gone.) Paul’s free, but he’s alone.

Everyone gets caught in the same wake this season, and everyone takes two steps forward and one step back. Progress is slow, but You’re The Worst shows us why that has to be. It’s an important lesson to remember in the coming years.

On the whole, I agree with the critics who say that this season seemed less focused, but much like Mr. Robot, it was for a good cause. Everyone in Jimmy and Gretchen’s circle seems to be elevated to main character status, and the show puts in the work to add life to the characters who usually hang out on the side. The cost, however, is real estate for those we were already invested in.

Still, You’re The Worst had some of its strongest moments this season, and I’m happy this show’s star is on the rise. Also, “Twenty-Two” might be the best individual episode of television this year.

Favorite Episodes: “Twenty-Two,” “The Seventh Layer,” “The Inherent, Unsullied, Qualitative Value of Anything”

7. Orange is the New Black

Well, here’s the part I’ve been dreading: The part where I have to talk about the penultimate episode of season four of OITNB. We’re going to be talking mostly about the death of Poussey Washington, so let me get some thoughts about the season as a whole out of the way. While others have jumped ship from the show, I’ve remained a staunch fan. It’s the show with the most great characters and the most great characters. Season four might be my favorite season since the first, and while it stumbled here and there, it had more pathos and focus than ever, and for that I’m grateful.

Right.

There’s a million ways to read into Poussey’s death, and we can’t get into them all in a simple end of year list. I agree with certain takes. I disagree with others. Mostly, however, I struggle. I wholeheartedly agree that there’s a problematic element to a room full of white writers crafting this moment of uniquely non-white suffering. However, to reduce that moment to merely a poorly executed political statement on Black Lives Matter and police injustice feels a bit reductive to me, and it doesn’t acknowledge the bigger picture.

Two human beings became the direct subjects of a broken and antiquated prison system. One human being, Bayley, subjected himself willingly. Slowly, he’s transformed from a bumbling kid into a bumbling prison guard, a job that requires him to make punitive decisions he otherwise wouldn't have to. Through incompetence and chaos, he becomes a killer. Bayley shouldn’t be forgiven. He is, after all, capable of rational thought and empathy, and the show going out of its way to demonstrate that makes me feel less sympathy for him than I would if he was some evil racist cartoon. But this didn’t have to be his fate. He wasn’t always doomed to be a murderer, and maybe he wouldn’t be if the system was different.

The other human being is, of course, Poussey, my favorite character on the show. (A claim I don’t make lightly.) Poussey didn’t subject herself to the system. She made the "mistake" of having a little bit of pot, and the system subjected itself onto her. As a result, Poussey is sent to prison, and through a series of events beyond her control, she is murdered in an act of fear and cowardice. Again, it didn’t have to be this way.

One critique I read (which I would link to but I can’t remember where I read it) argued that Poussey was chosen by the writers to die because she grew up with a more traditionally “white” background, and thus white audience members would feel more empathy. While there’s some merit to that argument, I think it misses the point. It would’ve been just as heartbreaking if any of the characters died this way. The tragedy is not only in the moment. It’s everything that led up to it as well. At the risk of sounding callous, the real question isn't "Why Poussey?" It's why not.

The broken prison system consumes all. It doesn’t care whose souls it feeds on, as long as we keep feeding it. In America, we mostly feed it black people. Everyone who avails themselves of this system is compromised in one way or another. We don’t have to forgive those who do it voluntarily and commit terrible acts. But we do have to remember that they are human beings. And we certainly have to respect and remember the dead who were forced into the system while we fight for the souls of the living.

The writers of the show made a decision. I’m not saying you have to like it or even respect it. I just implore you to consider all the angles.

Favorite Episodes: “Piece of Shit,” “The Animals,” “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again”

6. Fleabag

At an early point in the beginning of Fleabag’s six episode season, our protagonist, never mentioned by name and only referred to in the credits as “Fleabag,” talks about the accidental suicide of her best friend and business partner, Boo. Supposedly, Boo thought someone was sleeping with her boyfriend. So in an act of attention seeking and vague point making, she steps into a bike lane. She did not intend to die, but die she did, and now Fleabag lives in the wreckage.

If you’re any good at predicting story beats or making predictions, you can already guess the late season “twist.” In fact, I would argue that the show makes no attempt to surprise you and they telegraph the truth from as early as episode one. It’s not something hinted at specifically in the plotting. It has more to do with what we learn about Fleabag before she tells Boo’s story.

Fleabag, as her name may suggest, is not without her flaws. She’s selfish. She’s quick to snark. She’s judgmental and rude. She half-asses anything and everything that relates to her job at the cafe she and Boo started. (Though admittedly, there’s a good reason for that.) However, I for one think she’s actually pretty relatable. Many characters have been described as “saying what everyone thinks.” But thanks to Fleabag’s fourth wall breaking, we get a true sense of who she is, and as someone who's quick to deflection and sarcasm myself, I wound up agreeing with her a lot. From these interactions, one gets the sense that she’s prone to self-destruction, and while she thinks that other people can’t see her slow nervous breakdown, it’s written across her face pretty much from the jump off.

So when she says Boo suspected her boyfriend was cheating, we can guess who the mystery woman was that drove Boo to suicide.

If any of what I said sounds like I’m critiquing the show for its predictability, I’m not. I think Fleabag has some of the best character work and performances of any show this year, and its through those characters that we know we’re watching a train wreck in slow motion. It’s not a case of “will the other shoe drop?” The other shoe’s definitely dropping. The question then becomes “How bad will this get before it does.” And it gets bad.

By the way, Fleabag is also one of the funniest shows of the year.

Favorite Episodes: “Episode 2,” “Episode 4,” “Episode 6”

5. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

So I took a gander back at what I had written about the show back in my forty great TV episodes article. It says most of have to say about the show, thus my inner demons started shouting at me to just copy, paste, and edit that text in and hope you don't notice. Then my angels shouted them down. Then my demons retreated into my body and recruited my work ethic, which informed my better angels that we’re on page twenty two of the word document and we're moving too slowly. My angels then thought for a moment…

“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” will probably go down as the great episode of this series, and for good reasons. However, “The Race Card” is the episode that sold me on not only this particular show, but the idea that the O.J. trial was in any way interesting. Though I’m young, I've always been familiar with the details of the case. (I come from a family of lawyers, mind you.) I thought everything that needed to be said about the O.J. case had already been said a long time ago. Then I watched Chris Darden beg Marcia Clarke not to put Fuhrman on the stand. It suddenly occurred to me how far removed the DA's office must've been to the state of race relations in this country. Maybe that's how O.J. got away with it.

The People v. O.J. Simpson, as well as the incredible O.J.: Made in America, convinced me that the O.J. trial actually mattered in the grand scheme of American history. “The Race Card” started that train of thought.

Alright, fine. I’ll say new stuff.

There’s no reason The People v. O.J. Simpson had to be as good as it was. It could’ve been another cheesy court show draining every last drop of melodrama the case had to offer. Instead, The People v. O.J. Simpson is a gripping drama that tackles racial inequality, sexism, sensationalism, and the justice system with a surprisingly deft touch. And on top of all that, it was entertaining, funny when it wanted to be, and most surprisingly of all, poignant. And I expected nothing from this show. Nothing.

Favorite Episodes: “The Race Card,” “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” “Manna From Heaven”

4. Horace and Pete

(EDIT 11/11/2017: This section was written well before Louis C.K.'s history of abusive behavior was made public. I'm writing this only a few days after the fact, and I still don't quite know how to feel about my relationship with the show, let alone this episode, other than a deep sense of sadness and anger. But I'll leave this up for the sake of remembering that even the most seemingly trustworthy people can let us down.)

Horace and Pete’s is a dive bar somewhere in the heart of Brooklyn. It’s been around for literally one hundred years, and its old school nature doesn’t show in every corner so much as lurks. They don’t serve mixed drinks, the only beer on tap is Budweiser, hipsters and douchebags get charged more, and plenty drink for free. The bar was founded by two men named Horace and Pete Wittel, and ever since, the alcoholic abusers of the Wittel family have stayed in charge. The Wittel men take control when the previous generation dies, and there’s always a Horace and there’s always a Pete. Horace and Pete’s is the result of generations of abject misery.

In 2016, the Horace is Horace Wittel VIII, an inconsequential nobody, and Pete Wittel, a kind man who’s spent most of his life in and out of institutions fighting a severe mental illness. There’s also Uncle Pete, brother of Horace Wittel VII, a miserable foul mouthed bigot who tends bar. Horace doesn’t give two shits about the bar. Pete has nowhere to go, and Uncle Pete will stay in the bar until he dies. Sylvia, Horace and Pete’s perpetually resentful sister, is the only person who can see the bar for what it truly is, and is suing to sell.

Time passes and things change. People die. People get sick. People move on. But for the Wittel family, things only get worse. Horace struggles with what he wants to do about the bar. On one hand, he thinks he wants his old life as an accountant back. On the other hand, the lineage and tradition of the bar does seem to mean something to him. He finally makes a decision about what he wants to do after having served an institution that’s kept his family down his entire life. However, after the most tragic moment of the show, we’ll never get to hear what that decision was.

I don’t know about you guys, but there’s something about choosing to live in the shadow of destructive institutions and conventions that sure seems relevant in the wake of Trump’s election, don’t you think?

Favorite Episodes: “Episode 1,” “Episode 3,” “Episode 10”

3. BoJack Horseman

Ummm, alright. So how can I distract myself from talking about Sarah Lynn for a minute?

I suppose we can talk about “Fish Out of Water” for a second. True, “Fish Out of Water” has probably been talked about to death, but this might be the thing that happened in television this year that deserves that kind of discussion the most. “Fish Out of Water” is an unorthodox episode of BoJack, let alone an unorthodox episode of television in general—

(*Mind drifts towards Sarah Lynn*)

Shit! Ok, l don’t have anything to say about “Fish Out of Water” that hasn’t already been said before. It’s brilliant. So what else can we talk about?

Actually, let’s talk about “Brrap Brrap Pew Pew.” Behold, the titular “Brrap Brrap Pew Pew” music video:

Season 03 Episode 06 - BRRAP BRRAP PEW PEW Because I hate 8fps video. Re-edit of a video from https://www.youtube.com/user/madbuttface LYRICS [Verse 1] I'm a baby killer Baby killing makes me horny Aliens inside me Gonna squash it like Sigourney [Hook] Get dat fetus, kill dat fetus Get dat fetus, kill dat fetus Brrap brrap, pew pew Brrap brrap, pew pew [Verse 2] I'm a dolphin doll face Bitches in my crawl space Have abortions sometimes?

I’m one of those people who laughs at everything and anything wildly inappropriate, and this music video made me laugh harder than most things in 2016. But in a larger context, “Brrap Brrap Pew Pew” made me realize something about BoJack that’s been alarmingly obvious about the show for a while: BoJack Horseman is really funny. I know, profound right? The comedy show has comedy in it. But when people talk about BoJack they usually aren’t talking about Todd getting lost in the improv world or J.D. Salinger running a reality show or the incredible payoff to all those spaghetti strainers in the season three finale. Usually, they’re talking about the devastating penultimate BoJack episodes. His harrowing journey into the life he never had in “Downer Ending.” His destructive actions in “Escape from L.A.” Sarah Lynn—

(*Mind drifts towards Sarah Lynn*)

Alright fine. Let’s talk about Sarah Lynn.

I will say that I think “Escape from L.A.” is a more cohesive episode of television, but even that didn’t go in such a dark direction as everyone is still alive by the end of it. After the aftermath of BoJack’s failed Oscar campaign, he’s friendless and lacking in opportunities. So he enlists Sarah Lynn, the young starlet who played his daughter in the sitcom that got him famous that’s become a caricature of starlet drug abuse, to go on a bender. As BoJack begins to have periods of sporadic black outs, he and Sarah Lynn go to an AA meeting, visit BoJack’s almost victim from “Escape from L.A.” at Oberlin, and they end the bender at the Griffith Observatory. While in the planetarium, BoJack has a realization about his place in the universe, and Sarah Lynn dies in his arms.

I know all I did was spoil the plot of the episode. I’m just not sure what to say here, other than it’s now the moment I think about whenever BoJack Horseman comes up in passing. I don’t know how things can get worse for BoJack, and while I look forward to next season with all my heart, I’m scared to find out.

Favorite Episodes: “Fish Out of Water,” “Brrap Brrap Pew Pew,” “That’s Too Much, Man!”

2. Halt And Catch Fire

At the behest of all the critics I read and people I follow on Twitter, 2016 was the year I started Halt & Catch Fire. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, other than the fact that I probably wasn’t going to like the first season very much, but in the end it would be worth it.

So I watched the first season, and yeah, it’s not great. Though the pilot’s pretty good on the whole, it seemed to be a show very much aware of the fact that it existed in the era of “peak TV.” A dark mysterious protagonist. Period specific storylines about people making impulsive decisions out of emotional spite rather than rational decision making. The most ham-fisted visual metaphors ever. It all pointed to a show with incredible promise contented to chase the highs of other shows that came before it. (Particularly Mad Men.) I don’t think any of it was offensively bad, mind you. Just uninspired.

Season two might be the life time winner of the “most improved player” award. It’s a season that realized not only which characters we actually like, but what we like about the characters we don’t. Joe went from impulsive business mogul who does impulsive business mogul shit to someone who can’t help getting in his own way. Donna and Cameron played bigger roles in not only the show, but their roles as business leaders, and we see how they change because of it. Gordon and Bosworth head in their own fascinating directions as well, as Bosworth grasps for a role in his post prison life and Gordon struggles with his damaged brain. It wasn’t a perfect season. It carried over a bad habit or two from its first season and it still had a flare for the melodramatic here and there. But I finally understood the hype.

Season three is transcendently great television from start to finish. No longer was it chasing the highs of other shows. Nothing has ever felt remotely like it. It even makes moves many a prestige television drama has tried and failed and makes them sing. It’s a season of bold story decisions, delicate and in-depth character work, sweeping change, and raw humanity.

There’s plenty I could talk about. The beautifully developed rift between Donna and Cameron. The rise and fall of Joe MacMillon’s anti-virus company. The incredibly well executed time jump, a story telling device I’ve learned to loathe over the past few years. The exhilarating two part finale. However, the element in season three I think about the most is the tragedy of Ryan Ray.

I didn’t like Ryan as a human being, but I respected his viewpoint and I felt for him, as I believed he always had good intentions. Late in the season, he leaks the MacMillon Utility source code and becomes a fugitive. Out of options and feeling abandoned by his mentor, he tragically takes his own life and leaves a public note on the Mutiny pages. Here’s the note:

"I, Ryan Ray, released the MacMillan Utility source code. I acted alone. No one helped me, and no one told me to do it. I did this because “security” is a myth. Contrary to what you might have heard, my friends, you are not safe. Safety is a story. It's something we teach our children so they can sleep at night. But we know it's not real.

Beware, baffled humans. Beware of false prophets who will sell you a fake future. Of bad teachers, corrupt leaders, and dirty corporations. Beware of cops and robbers, the kind that rob your dreams. But most of all, beware of each other, because everything's about to change. The world is going to crack wide open. There's something on the horizon. A massive connectivity. The barriers between us will disappear, and we're not ready. We'll hurt each other in new ways. We'll sell and be sold. We'll expose our most tender selves, only to be mocked and destroyed. We'll be so vulnerable, and we'll pay the price. We won't be able to pretend that we can protect ourselves anymore. It's a huge danger, a gigantic risk, but it's worth it. If only we can learn to take care of each other, then this awesome, destructive new connection won't isolate us. It won't leave us in the end so totally alone.”

A little too cute with the knowledge of what's happening now? Maybe. But I don't care. Season three of Halt and Catch Fire, I think, is about fear. Fear of the coming future. Fear of losing everything you care about. I watched this scene a day or two after the election. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Favorite Episodes: “The Threshold,” “You Are Not Safe,” “NeXT/NIM”

1. Atlanta

Indulge me in a fantasy, if you will.

Imagine we lived in a world where television actually reflected the beautiful diversity of the human species. Imagine a place where the entertainment industry was as layered and nuanced as it should be. Where people of all colors and gender preferences weren’t just in front of the camera, but behind it as well, writing your favorite shows or selling them to distributors. At the very least, imagine a world where a “black” show wasn’t seen as such a novelty.

In that world, Atlanta would still be my favorite television show of 2016.

I feel the need to express a caveat or two. If “favorite TV” meant “best plotted” or some phrasing that points to best storytelling, I think I would go with Halt and Catch Fire. If it meant most memorable moments, I would also go with Halt and Catch Fire or BoJack. This is my way of saying that I think there was better executed television this year, and stuff I felt more attached to on an emotional level.

But then I remember that this is a “favorite” list, not a “best” list, and then I imagine that I had a time machine. I imagine stepping into the machine and traveling back to my college or high school days and telling myself one important thing: In the year 2016, there will be a surrealist comedy show about hip hop and everything you’ve spent your entire life worshipping, and it’s called Atlanta. “Will it be any good?” My younger self would eagerly ask. And that’s when my impulse to fuck with people would probably kick in, and my current self would step back into the machine and disappear without a word.

Younger me would wait for the day Atlanta arrives, and on the night of its premiere, I imagine him weeping for joy over just how great Atlanta is.

Atlanta has all the things a truly great TV show should have. Great writing. Great characters. A unique approach to storytelling. An invisible car. However, what makes Atlanta my favorite show of 2016 is the simple fact that I’ve never seen its kind of sensibility before. It’s a show that de-emphasizes traditional narrative in favor of weird mini stories about weird specters on city busses and breakfast cereal commercials fraught with police brutality and black Justin Bieber. It’s a show with, at best, a relaxed attitude about all the things I care about in a TV show. And I love it.

Atlanta showed me something I’ve never seen on TV before. It broadened the horizons of what this medium can accomplish and how it can be used for expression. It’s a show about serious issues that refuses to try to be “serious.” It’s the kind of show we need the most in the times ahead, and even with its flaws, it’s perfect.

Favorite Episodes: “Streets On Lock,” “Value,” “The Jacket”

Honorable Mentions:

Better Call Saul
Broad City
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (I couldn’t make a decision whether or not to talk about the second half of season one or the first half of season two. Or both. Know that I love Crazy Ex-Girlfriend either way. List making is stupid.)
Documentary Now!
Game of Thrones (We’ll be talking about Game of Thrones in the next article. As to this season, there were elements I really liked and elements I hated with a burning passion. But the good stuff was some of the best the show has ever done.)
Lady Dynamite
Last Week Tonight
Luke Cage
The Night Of
Preacher
Search Party
Silicon Vally
South Park
Stranger Things
Transparent
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Veep
Westworld

Wish I’d Seen:

The Americans (Working on it! On season two. Forgive me.)
Black-ish
The Crown
Full Frontal With Samantha Bee
The Girlfriend Experience
High Maintenance
Queen of Sugar
Rectify (Very much a “Now that it’s over, I feel like 2017 will be the year I run through it all in a week or two” kind of affair.)
Red Oaks

Music

2016 was a strange year, and one could feel it in the art. Video games and television had a year of experimentation, some of it working and some of it not. Movies had a tragically awful summer, only to follow it up with one of the most fascinating Oscar seasons in recent memory. Every medium flirted with weirdness, and I would argue that music was the weirdest.

Long awaited projects and artists we haven’t heard from in years came to life in sudden bursts. Everything from your Frank Oceans to your REDACTED TO NOT SPOIL A RELEASE THAT HAS A RATHER HIGH SPOT ON THIS LIST. Though I sincerely hope not, this was the year we may have finally seen the true fall of Kanye West. This was the year where anyone even considered criticizing Beyoncé after her Super Bowl performance and the “Formation” video and Drake released an album that not everybody loved, despite becoming one of the biggest acts in the world. Most of all, however, this was a year of unfathomable loss.

Despite all that, however, I think music won 2016 in art.

Let us for a minute consider Chance the Rapper. If this was 2008 or really any year I was in high school, an artist like Chance would never have any hope of breaking into the mainstream. He might’ve had a hit or two much in the same way as Lupe Fiasco, but he would be the kind of guy you point to when you’re young and obnoxious and say, “Why can’t he be on the radio? He’s so good!!!!” Now, in 2016, artists like Chance who don’t want anything to do with record labels can become household names, and that makes me unbelievably happy.

Apart from the changing parameters of who can achieve mainstream success, it was simply a year filled to the brim with quality releases across all genres. I’m not sure I listened to anything that captured me as much as the highs of 2015, but some things came pretty damn close. You won’t get any complaints from me.

Before we go into the list, a bit of housecleaning. I took Blackstar, You Want it Darker, and Skeleton Tree out of consideration. All three are incredible albums, but I also project onto them emotions that inflate each album in my mind to highs I don’t think they actually reach when you divorce them from context. And yet, it felt wrong to not give any one of these the number one spot. In the end, It doesn’t matter what I think of Bowie, Leonard Cohen, or Nick Cave. They are in the pantheon. My opinion doesn’t matter.

Love you, Bowie. Love you, Cohen. Nick, I wish you all the happiness in the world.

Alright, let’s get listing!

Runner-Up: Ka, Honor Killed the Samurai

The bars on this album. My god.

Here’s a bar from the song “Ours” about how he wishes he was protected as a child from the sights of drugs and violence while simultaneously exposing children to drugs and violence via his lifestyle.

On days wish I could save the children that we was

We didn't spare they eyes from all the killings and the drugs

Stepping and protecting them from feeling any slugs

Many ways mediate, the savior healing any grudge

Here’s another bar from “$” that addresses his maneuvers in the music industry, his refusal to compromise his art, and his fear that any financial success may change things for the worst.

Don't place win it, just no snakes in it, play the grass safely

And trust every cut is nuts, won't let 'em castrate me

If happen to make cash, don't let the cash make me

Regardless I'm a guarded artist, never graph hasty

Here’s another about how the violence he observed as a child informed who he is today and why he’s successful.

No one's mixing words, vicious verbs emerge from being this disturbed

As a kid observed on curbs where they twist the herb

Was wrapping the present years before the gift was heard

My quarters wasn't in calm waters, the ship’s perturbed

Ka is somewhat of an acquired taste. Whereas most people like their rappers bursting with energy and presence, Ka has a slow meditative flow with dense writing and almost monotone delivery. Simple way of saying it: He’s not what you play at a party.

However, as you can hopefully see, Ka can communicate more in a single bar than most rappers can in an entire album. Honor Killed the Samurai is incredibly heavy with haunting lyrics about growing up surrounded by the violence in Brownsville, being trapped by institutions, and staying true to your artistic integrity. It’s not easy listening. In fact, this album can be downright chilling. But it’s worth every second.

Speaking of integrity, a quick note about the New York Post article. For those of you who don’t know, Ka is a captain for the New York Fire Department by day and the New York Post ran an article attacking Ka for his lyrics about oppressive police officers. I would link to it, but I don’t want to drive any traffic to the site or the article. Susan Edelman, Ka is a hero. You’re an empty vacuous bottom feeder of a journalist and a worthless piece of shit of a human being.

Favorite Songs: “Conflicted,” “Just,” “Ours”

10. Childish Gambino, “Awaken, My Love!”

Of all the dumb arbitrary debates I had with myself in making these lists, “Awaken, My Love!” versus Honor Killed the Samurai was probably the hardest one I had to have. For a while I went the other way. I’ve listened to Honor Killed the Samurai much more in the previous weeks, and overall, I consider it the more cohesive album of the two.

But I’m a sucker for a good ol’ fashioned creative left turn.

Fans may want one thing, but artists are going to be artists, and if they deliver you the same thing over and over again you will get tired of it. Trying new things can be risky, but it can change the conversation and bring in new fans.

I was not the biggest Childish Gambino fan in the world. I liked Camp alright and while I’m not the biggest fan of Because the Internet, it has a few tracks I still listen to here and there and a lot of cool ideas I would’ve loved to have seen fleshed out a little better. So when “Awaken, My Love!” was announced and people were saying it’s an R&B album, I was cool with it. “Ok, “Urn” is one of my favorite songs on Because the Internet. If it’s an album of that, then I could be down.”

What I was not expecting was a full blown psychedelic soul album. What I was not expecting was lush funk arrangements and tracks that constantly morph in bold new directions. What I was not expecting was something so far away from his previous albums that it took me a while to remember what a Childish Gambino album used to be. Most of all, however, I was not expecting to sit in my apartment, listen to a Childish Gambino album, and be transported back to my younger days when my father played me and my brother Maggot Brain in the car.

“Awaken, My Love!” has its flaws, but it spoke to me in a very intense and personal way. If there’s one thing I was grateful for in 2016, it was Donald Glover. Also, I’m happy to stare at that album cover all day.

Favorite Songs: “Me and Your Mama,” “Redbone,” “Terrified,” “Stand Tall”

9. Crying, Beyond the Fleeting Gales

You know what I didn’t know I needed in 2016? A fucking guitar hero album!

No, I’m not talking about the video game. I’m talking about music from an era where people use to mythologize rock stars and rock music in general. The kind of fantasy you had when you were mad at your parents because they didn’t “understand” you and made you do your homework and follow their rules, but then you’d go to the arena where your favorite band was playing, and you’d rock out as hard as you could and the guitarist would slay a dragon with his solo or something like that.

I thought the part of me that wanted an album like that had been dead for a long time. But then I found that feeling again in Beyond the Fleeting Gales. It’s an album with the incredibly loud and incredibly powerful guitar riffs that’ll make you want to skateboard in front of a bank and accuse your mother of being the government.

It’s also an album of softly sung vocals. And I mean soft. Like, “It was often the case that the music was drowning out the vocals, and maybe you put a lot of effort into writing those lyrics and I’d love to hear them, but sometimes I can’t” levels of soft. So after I was done listening to the album, I went online and read all the lyrics. They’re about a myriad of topics, but I think a lot of it is about the fear that comes when your circumstances are changing and feeling like your predestined towards certain behaviors thanks to the way you were raised.

“Cool.” I thought. Then twenty four hours later, Trump got elected. Now the lyrics meant something else.

If at any moment in sounded like I was making fun of this album, I’m not. It takes what was once nerdy and makes it cool. If it sounds like I'm criticizing Elaiza Santos's vocals, I'm not. Her singing grounds the music and prevents the songs from completely overwhelming you with their energy. In fact, I find her voice rather lovely.

For me, this is an album about rebirth and picking yourself up from off the dirt. Those lyrics may sound foreboding in foreboding times. But it’s mostly an album about triumphing over the parts of your life that are holding you back. Though it’s a throwback to styles of old, it’s something I certainly need now.

Favorite Songs: “Wool in the Wash,” “Origin,” “The Curve”

8. Death Grips, Bottomless Pit

I got into Death Grips after they announced that they were supposedly splitting up. Bummed was I, for you see we’re going to talk about Death Grips again in an article or two and let’s just say that I like them a lot.

But then came Bottomless Pit, and I have to admit, there was a part of me that was worried we wouldn’t get the true authentic Death Grips we’ve always had in a new supposedly post-breakup release. Who knows what led to the end of the group the first time, and maybe things wouldn’t entirely play out on the creative end of things.

Then I hit play on “Giving Bad People Good Ideas” and all those fears were washed away in one of the loudest angriest tracks they’ve ever done. It was like the band was telling me to go fuck myself for ever doubting them. In fact, Bottomless Pit has probably become one of my all time favorite Death Grips albums.

Bottomless Pit is a great Death Grips album in the same way that all Death Grips albums are great. It carries on the tradition of chaos and rage while sounding distinct from the albums that came before it. However, the special part of Bottomless Pit is best exemplified in the video for “Eh.”

Directed by: Sean Metelerkamp Post production by: Christopher Bisset Produced by: Jon Day Featuring: Stefan Burnett Nina Milner Sean Metelerkamp Edited by: Nina Milner Graphic Design by: Hanno van Zyl Makeup by: Mehnaaz Maleta Lighting: John Second Special thanks: Nicholas Ellis-Brown

“Eh” is an amazing video. It’s unsettling as hell, but for what it is, it’s really well made. That’s always been the secret to Death Grips for me: It’s violent chaos, but it’s well made violent chaos. Remember my friend in the article about The Witness that only likes music that sounds like clockwork? Though he isn’t nearly as big a fan as I am, even he likes Death Grips in part because of just how skilled they are at making their anarchy.

There are, of course, elements to Bottomless Pit that make it worthy of this list beyond production, but Bottomless Pit sounds so great that I could talk about it for hours. This might be their best produced album yet, and though the mere idea of“polish” seems to run contrary to their aesthetic, Death Grips has a way of making the balance sing. Then crushing you with it. Death Grips is a violent “fuck you” to everybody and everything, including low-fi.

Favorite Tracks: “Giving Bad People Good Ideas,” “Spikes,” “Eh”

7. Anderson .Paak, Malibu

One thing became obvious to me in 2016: Anderson .Paak is going to be a superstar.

I’m not going to claim to know what it takes to become a star. One could probably argue that there isn’t really a roadmap and the sequence of events that lead to fame are random and chaotic. But there are certainly some aspects the biggest stars have in common.

One obvious trait is talent, and it becomes clear well before the end of the first song on Malibu, or any one of the millions of features .Paak had in the last few years for that matter, that he’s not lacking in that department. He’s a great singer with a raspy old school voice who can effortlessly transition from singing to rapping, and when he does, his bars are of equal quality.

Another trait, I feel, is universal appeal. The big stars can appeal to anyone, and Malibu is an album that’s pretty much for everybody. If you want some passionate neo-soul or R&B, check out “The Bird” or “Celebrate.” If you want something to dance to, you’ll want “Am I Wrong” or “Lite Weight.” Want some introspection? Listen to “The Waters” or “The Season / Carry Me.” There’s something for everyone on this album, and it seems like there’s no kind of music this man can’t make.

This is something that falls into the last two categories, but I would argue that another important element to fame, at least in music, is performance. It’s one thing to have a good voice or the ability to write a catchy song. But neither of those talents mean a thing if you don’t know what to do with them. However, one listen to Malibu is enough to demonstrate that .Paak doesn’t have that problem either. It’s an album that’s simultaneously relaxed and contemplative, but also bursting with energy and charisma. And not that live performance is an important element when considering an album, but watch .Paak’s national television debut on Colbert and how he starts with a slow baby making jam and slowly transitions into a hyper animated rock show.

Air Date: 03/02/2016 One of my favorite performances from Anderson .Paak I do not own this video. For entertainment purposes only. Live on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert

(Note: His performance on Fallon was also pretty damn great.)

I know I’ve been talking more about the man than the album, and believe me, I’m just as excited about Malibu as I am about .Paak himself. But Anderson .Paak is an exceptionally talented artist who deserves long lasting fame and makes me excited about where pop music can go.

Favorite Songs: “The Season / Carry Me,” “Am I Wrong,” “Parking Lot”

6. Noname, Telefone

Much like 2016 in general, Telefone runs on two opposite ends of an emotional spectrum. On one hand, Telefone is a lovely hip hop album with some of the warmest beats I’ve heard on any project in a very long time. I’ve found it difficult to fully explain precisely the feeling I’m talking about. Genre wise, the beats fall into a sort of jazzy gospel vibe, but that doesn’t quite describe it. The phrase “mellow Super Mario World music” came to mind, but that’s sarcastic and reductive and doesn’t quite capture it either.

So let’s use some abstract vague-ery. Listening to Telefone is like waking up on Saturday morning and realizing that you have no responsibilities, and the sun’s out. You have a good breakfast, then you say “fuck it” and go for a walk. You’re listening to some good music along the way, and then it suddenly occurs to you that you don’t have work tomorrow. Then you smile. You’re not bounding with joy and acting like you’re in a musical. You’re just content.

While positive feelings abound from the music, that’s when we get into the other end of the emotional spectrum, as some of the lyrics can be quietly devastating. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of joy to be found in the lyrics. However, Telefone is also very much an album about personal struggle, death, violence, and certain realities of growing up in Chicago.

Take for instance the opening track, “Yesterday.” The beat itself is unspeakably warm and vibrant. But upon closer examination of the lyrics, this is also a song about how positivity is essential when it feels like you’re consumed by darkness and grief, which in Noname’s case, comes from the death of her grandmother and Chicago mentor Brother Mike. “Casket Pretty” is a heartbreaking song about Chicago and a particularly horrific Summer. “Bye Bye Baby” is a heartbreaking but loving song about abortion. (Yes, apparently such a conversation is possible, and Noname proves it.)

It’s honestly not my intention to disparage Chance or anything, but Telefone was for me what I think Coloring Book was for a lot of people: A positive album bursting with warmth, humanity, and hope. I don’t know about you guys, but that’s certainly what I needed in 2016.

Favorite Songs: “Yesterday,” “Diddy Bop,” “Casket Pretty,” “Bye Bye Baby”

5. Car Seat Headrest, Teens of Denial

On January 13, 2012, an Italian cruise ship called the Costa Concordia struck a rock and began to sink. It took an hour for the captain to give the evacuation order, and as a result of that and the general incompetence of the ship’s management, thirty three people ended up dying. Several legal battles are still being fought, the wreck costs the ship’s owners over two billion dollars, and the captain was later sentenced to sixteen years in prison. This is what the term “clusterfuck” was invented for.

I mention all this because there’s an eleven and a half minute song on the back end of Teens of Denial called “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia.” Though there are references to the actual shipwreck, the song is an incredibly thorough chronicle of a complete mental breakdown. It’s written in three acts. The first act is the status quo, so to speak, and the status quo is abject misery.

“I used to like the mornings

I’d survived another night

I’d walk to breakfast through the garden

See the flowers stretching in the sunlight

Now I wake up in the mornings

And all the kindness is drained out of me

I spend hours just wincing

And trying to regain some sense of peace”

There used to be a time when some sense of happiness was attainable. Now there’s no connection to anything, and the only thing our narrator wants is to return to the sense of tranquility. Part one continues on in a similar fashion. Late nights. The ticking clock of age. The knowledge that these feelings will ultimately get worse, but there is no other path, and though you know it’ll harm you there’s simply no way around it.

Part two is the breakdown. There isn’t a whole lot of structure to it. It’s just one rambling verse of anger and self loathing. How did I get here? How was I supposed to know how to live? Was I always doomed to be this way? It ramps up longer and longer until we finally get to a weirdly triumphant, but ultimately heartbreaking conclusion. “I give up.”

Part three is the continuing hollow victory in the realization that there’s nothing left. It touches on being a vessel for systems and how trying to escape the misery can lead to you sinking even lower. All the while, we get that repeated phrase. “I give up.”

So yeah, you can see why the analogy to a sinking cruise ship may be apt.

However, it ends on a note of sincere vulnerability. The music slows down, the victory march ends, and Will Toledo sings to us softly:

“And you wake up trembling

From a dream where I swam into the river

I reach out and hold you in my arms

I love you, I love you, I love you”

(There's another interpretation of those lyrics, but... just let me have this.)

That’s what I love the most about Teens of Denial. It is an incredibly heavy album that explores despondency and depression in aching detail, but it’s also an album of catharsis and the realization that it’s possible to move on. It’s an album of emotional extremes, and while that may seem like the last thing you may want right now, I promise you that you won’t walk away miserable.

Also, gun to my head, “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” might be my favorite song of the year.

Favorite Songs: “Fill in the Blank,” “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales,” “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia”

4. A Tribe Called Quest, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service

After Trump’s election, I didn’t feel like myself again until I listened to this album.

In the days after, despite the thing I wrote earlier in the year about why we need to get over the nostalgia market, I found myself returning to the music I first truly fell in love with as an adolescent. Mainly, Native Tongues (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, etc.) and the neo-soul R&B and hip hop of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. (I’d specify more, but we’re going to be talking about many of these albums again soon enough and I don’t want to use all my energy here.) I think part of it was finding some sort of solidarity with the political nature of this music. I’ll take anger over despair in a pinch, and “The Proud” certainly helped me in that regard. But I think it was mostly about finding comfort in… anything at all. Something had been snuffed out, and it was hard to tell what.

So then a new Tribe album dropped, and I wasn’t expecting much. While Q-Tip’s solo albums have been pretty great, particularly The Renaissance, Phife had passed and I was feeling low. Tribe hadn’t put out an album in well over fifteen years and their relationship towards the end seemed rocky at best. And besides, we all know how “comeback” albums usually go.

Not expecting much, I listened. It became clear pretty early on that it was everything I could’ve hoped for.

There’s plenty to love about this album. The lyrics. The production. However, the thing that keeps me coming back to it is its blend of old styles and new. There’s another universe somewhere where Tribe simply sat on their laurels and just did another classically “Tribe’ album. (I probably would’ve love that as well, but that’s not the point.) Instead, they embraced the new as well. This is, after all, a Tribe album that features synths (“Conrad Tokyo”) and reggae (“Black Spasmodic”) and other sounds that aren’t as prevalent in their older discography. Or at the very least, the Tribe of old would probably never have Jack White and Elton John on their songs.

A Tribe Called Quest earned their place because they’ve always strived to do something different and progressive. They were never a group to play it safe, and as a result, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service somehow manages to balance sounding like a Tribe album of old and something entirely new.

I would also argue that it’s there most political album to date, and while that’s one factor I love out of many, it’s what ultimately tipped me over from “this is a great album” to “Holy shit, I love this album.” It’s something from the old world that’s bursting with light, and it’s the spirit I’d been trying to find in the old music I’d been listening to. We’ve lost much in the wake of the election, but we haven’t lost everything good about ourselves. We’re still capable, and this album reminded me that we need to tap into that sense of hope and action now more than ever.

Thank you, Phife. For everything.

Favorite Songs: “The Space Program,” “Solid Wall of Sound,” “Conrad Tokyo”

3. Danny Brown, Atrocity Exhibition

I spent a lot of time in 2016 listening to stories from addicts. Some of it was for research I’m doing on a thing I’m working on, but a lot of it was purely coincidental, especially in the remaining months of the year. It seems that certain events (*cough cough*) brought a lot of old feelings to the surface, and one of the more interesting revelations I had about addiction though came from Marc Maron’s introduction to his WTF episode with Roseanne Barr. (The episode came out on August 1st, but I think I listened to it about a month later.) Maron usually begins WTF by talking about whatever’s on his mind or something that’s bothering him. In this case, it was the election. First, he talks about Oxycodone abuse amongst angry white men and the “two things” that happen before you get high: “I’m going to feel better” and “I fucking hate me.” And then you float.

But then Maron, a recovering addict himself, compares voting for Trump to the rush of shooting up or swallowing a pill or snorting another line:

“What is compelling about engaging with (Trump’s) vision is that it’s a rush. It's a rush of shameless hate. It's a hit of arrogant ignorance. It's the satisfaction in moments of empty victory. It’s the nihilistic intensity of potential chaotic upheaval and destruction. I mean, there's no other way to look at it. There's no foresight. There's no vision of the future. There isn’t. It's the possible annihilation of all progress with no real plan. It's the elation from the fantasy of complete moral bankruptcy.”

According to Maron, getting high is a “fuck you” to everyone and everything, including yourself. I couldn’t stop thinking about that feeling while listening to Atrocity Exhibition.

Now, we’ve talked about Danny Brown before. Specifically, we talked about how XXX, and how the party leads to despair, and despair leads back to the party. Atrocity Exhibition follows a similar thematic through line, only it begins with the despair, the darkness is much much darker, and the chaos is all consuming.

The main difference, I would argue, is that while XXX is an album about the spiral of drugs, Atrocity Exhibition scratches beneath the surface. It’s an album about depression, and how drugs make everything worse. Hell, the first song is called “Downward Spiral,” and it immediately begins with him sweating in a room he hasn’t left for three days and fighting off literal ghosts while his jaw’s become swollen from the constant grinding of his teeth.

It starts low, and from here on in, we’re exploring all parts of the emotional scale. Sometimes, things gets lower, as is the case with “Tell Me What I Don’t Know” which finds Danny Brown getting caught further in the cycle of drug dealing and “Rolling Stone” which finds him further in his depression. Sometimes, things get higher, like the Teens of Denial like hollow victory of “Dance in the Water” and the calming bliss of “Get Hi.” There are moments of relief, but they don’t last.

Though the hopelessness seems overwhelming, Atrocity Exhibition ends in a moment of triumph with “Hell For It.” It’s a song about where he used to be and where he is now. The forces that kept him at bay, be it the drugs or depression or the society he lives in, have been feeding on his energy for far too long. Now he’ll fight for the glory he’s always been capable of this whole time, and nothing will hold him back.

Favorite Songs: “Rolling Stone,” “Dance in The Water,” “Hell For It”

2. Solange, A Seat at the Table

This is the video for "I Decided," the lead single off Solange Knowles's second album, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. This was also my introduction to her as an artist:

I caught the video late one night on MtvU (because I’m a cool person!) and fell in love with it immediately. I even bought the video on iTunes, for this was just before the Youtube boom. (Or at least, my awareness of it.) However, the music itself never really resonated with me. I found her voice a little too precious, and while the video shines with personality and strong political messages, that passion didn’t seem to be in the music itself. I checked out a song or two on that album, and it was kind of the same deal, so my interest waned. It’s entirely possible I just picked the wrong songs. I didn’t really give it a chance, and I know that.

Ditto for True, her follow-up EP. Again, there were interesting ideas and people really into fashion seemed to like it a lot because of the video for “Losing You.” But I was drowning in the throwback ‘80s sound, and it was just a little too much at the time.

I wanted something from Solange that her music wasn’t delivering. I wanted that video. That politically charged pro-black righteousness that poured out of my first exposure to her. I also couldn’t connect with her singing voice. There just didn’t seem to be anything behind it, or at the very least, nothing I couldn’t get from other artists.

Then I listened to Solange sing “Weary,” and I could feel the anger behind it and the literal… weariness. She sounds like she’s tired and frustrated. Like someone who's furious with the bullshit, but also defeated by it. She does have a strong voice, but it’s also seething with vulnerability. Or to put it another way, you listen to a song by her sister in a big crowded arena and you dance along. Solange’s voice was designed for a more one-on-one conversation.

There’s a way to spin what I said to make it sound negative, but that's not my intention. For its through her voice that both the album’s defeats and triumphs resonate so much. The same woman telling her listener to be weary of the world and telling you about the hardships of black women and the feelings of being denied your own rage is the same woman who’s reveling in the joys of celebration and self-care.

A Seat at the Table is an album of stunning beauty and splendor. It’s an album about a black woman finding herself in modern American society, despite the actions of her countrymen and the oppressiveness of the systems that control her life. It’s a society designed for her destruction, but she rises above it all.

Favorite Songs: “Cranes in the Sky,” “F.U.B.U.,” “Scales”

1. The Avalanches, Wildflower

Is Wildflower as good as Since I Left You? Probably not. But it doesn’t have to be, and frankly, I never expected it to reach those highs. As is the case with A Tribe Called Quest, The Avalanches hadn’t put out an album in over fifteen years, and as we’ll discuss in a few articles from now, I like Since I Left You... quite a bit.

Is Wildflower a big important political album? Nope. Or at the very least, that’s not its primary goal. Wildflower is a sample based dance album that draws from ‘60s psychedelia and ‘70s urban disco. It’s inspired by the counterculture of those eras, but it’s not shoving a message down your throat or trying to get you to smash the state.

Wildflower is my favorite album of 2016 for one very simple reason: It makes me happy. And I’m not talking about “Oh, this is fun” happy. I mean genuinely happy.

As we’ve already discussed, 2016 was a shit year for the human species as a whole. I’m sure some of you had good years on a personal level. People got married. Babies were born. Maybe some of you got a new job, and everything’s starting to take off. For me, it was a year of rejection and loss. Many of my heroes died. Grad school, for the final time, didn’t pan out. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to. Even the petty bullshit that you're supposed to forget got pettier. While I was moving, which was a series of nightmares in its own right, I got slapped with a jury summons and barely dodged a two month trial. Worst of all, however, my stepfather who’s been around my whole life died after a six month battle with two primary cancers. People assuredly had worse years, but it’s hard to see past my own selfishness.

But whenever I listen to Wildflower, I think about the ways I got a little better in 2016. Some of these ways were small. I started reading books for pleasure again and while I used to live off grocery store rotisserie chickens and Eat24, now I cook every meal I eat. However, some of these ways were much more significant. I didn’t write as much, but I actually feel good about the few things I did. Like, really good. That feeling usually goes away when you re-read your own work, but that’s happening less and less.

And hey, I started this blog! I haven’t reached the point yet where I give a shit about how many people see it or my Twitter presence or whatever. But I made a corner for myself on the internet that I control, and I’m happy I have it.

I can’t help but think about these positive things because Wildflower abounds in pure joy. As group member Robbie Chater told the Guardian, “It starts in a kind of hyper-realistic urban environment, then goes on a road trip to the sea or the desert or the countryside, while you’re on acid. So you start in the city and over the course of the record you end up somewhere far away from there, high as a kite.” Now, I’ve never tried hallucinogenics, and to be perfectly honest I can count the number of times I’ve smoked weed on one hand. But yeah, that description’s about right.

And there’s much I could talk about, from the music itself to the guest artists to the whatever. But it all boils down to the fact that this album puts a big dumb smile on my face and makes me feel, even if only for a few seconds, that everything might be alright.

Favorite Songs: "Because I'm Me," "Subways," "Harmony"

Couldn't Make a Decision on Whether or Not it Counted:

Run The Jewels, Run The Jewels 3

Honorable Mentions:

Angel Olsen, My Woman
ANOHNI, Hopelessness
Apollo Brown & Skyzoo, The Easy Truth
Atmosphere, Fishing Blues
Beyonce, Lemonade
Blood Orange, Freetown Sound
Bon Iver, 22, A Million
Chance The Rapper, Coloring Book
clipping., Splendor & Misery
Common, Black America Again
De La Soul, and the Anonymous Nobody
Denzel Curry, Imperial
Esperanza Spalding, Emily’s D+Evolution
Frank Ocean, Blond/e
Injury Reserve, Floss
Jamila Woods, HEAVN
Jeff Rosenstock, WORRY.
Jenny Hval, Blood Bitch
Joey Purp, iiiDrops
Kamaiyah, A Good Night in the Ghetto
Kanye West, The Life of Pablo
Kaytranada, 99.9%
Kevin Abstract, American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story
Kero Kero Bonito, Bonito Generation
KING, We Are KING
Mitski, Puberty 2
Royce da 5’9”, Layers
Sophia Eris, Sophia Eris
Sturgill Simpson, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth
Vic Spencer & Big Ghost, The Ghost Of Living
Westside Gunn, Flygod (Mark my words: Westside Gunn, Conway, and the whole Griselda team will be the next big thing in authentic hip hop. I promise you.)
Xenia Rubinos, Black Terry Cat
YG, Still Brazy

Wish I Listened To:

Nah, I got everything. I think.

MAJOR SPOILERS ON EVERYTHING! Also, this one's long, so feel free to skip around.

Video Games

Runner-Up: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

10. Even the Ocean

9. Hyper Light Drifter

8. Titanfall 2

7. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

6. Oxenfree

5. Superhot

4. Abzû

3. The Witness

2. Doom

1. Inside

Honorable Mentions:

Wish I Played:

Movies

Runner-Up: Arrival

10. Zootopia

9. Paterson

8. Elle

7. The Handmaiden

6. O.J.: Made in America

5. Green Room

4. Manchester by the Sea

3. Moonlight

2. I Am Not Your Negro

1. Embrace of the Serpent

Honorable Mentions:

Wish I’d Seen:

TV

Runner-Up: Insecure

10. Better Things

9. Mr. Robot

8. You’re The Worst

7. Orange is the New Black

6. Fleabag

5. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

4. Horace and Pete

3. BoJack Horseman

2. Halt And Catch Fire

1. Atlanta

Honorable Mentions:

Wish I’d Seen:

Music

Runner-Up: Ka, Honor Killed the Samurai

10. Childish Gambino, “Awaken, My Love!”

9. Crying, Beyond the Fleeting Gales

8. Death Grips, Bottomless Pit

7. Anderson .Paak, Malibu

6. Noname, Telefone

5. Car Seat Headrest, Teens of Denial

4. A Tribe Called Quest, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service

3. Danny Brown, Atrocity Exhibition

2. Solange, A Seat at the Table

1. The Avalanches, Wildflower

Couldn't Make a Decision on Whether or Not it Counted:

Honorable Mentions:

Wish I Listened To:

The Nostalgia Bullshit

In Defense of Depressing Art

Top 10s of 2017: Games, Movies, Music, & TV

Top 10 Favorite Video Games of 2019

Top 10 Favorite Video Games of 2022