This is an annotated list of my favourite art from the year: best song, album, TV show(s), episode, movie, standup, and book(s). Such year-end lists, with their stark, horizontal numbering, attempt to confront us with the veneer of objectivity—Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, with the Lord’s Top 10. I will go in the opposite direction, and embrace subjectivity. Rather than a list of the best art from 2024, this is a catalogue of the best art I happened to encounter this year (although I’ll mostly veer toward this year.) I hope you will peruse it at your leisure, and perhaps find something new that you can enjoy too.

Best Song: Potential by Sadboi

Unlike last year, this year I really did not listen to much new music that I fell in love with. But, I did fall in love with one song: “Potential,” by Sadboi. A Canadian artist of Antiguan and Jamaican descent, she impressively—curiously—released both her first and second albums this year. None of those other 21 songs, however, reach the heights of Potential. It has a dancehall vibe, which will always get me. But it’s also got a certain energy and momentum to it; an erotic vulgarity, expressed with bravado, but encased within vulnerability. Its only flaw is that it is tragically, criminally, short! It is the only new song from last year that I found myself playing over and over and over again—and then again once more.

Best Album: Born & Raised / Paradise Valley, by John Mayer

Apologies to Swifties or the Beyhive, but it was really John Mayer had me in a chokehold this year. In particular, his albums Born and Raised and Paradise, both of which I usually just press play, and listen to in their entirety. But if I do dip in for a single song on B&A, which I do, then it is always “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967.” I remember very vividly the first time I ever heard this song: I was walking home from the University of Calgary, listening to the album for the first time, and suddenly I was listening to the sounds of a trumpet. I started to reach into my pocket to grab my MP3 player, because I was sure I had forgotten to ‘lock’ the buttons, and it had gotten switched to something else, but then Mayer started to sing. I thought it was so unusual and beautiful to start the song like he did, and I’ve been in love ever since. I cannot think of many other songs the lyrics of which so effectively put very specific and evocative images in my mind.

Whether it’s, “From dry land/ He rolled it over to wet sand/ Closed the hatch up with one hand/ And peddled off alone”; or “And the sky was aflare/ When he came up for air/ In his homemade, fan-blade/ One-man, submarine ride”; and of course, “Now his friends bring him up when they’re drinking/ At the bar with his name on the side.” Who doesn’t want to root for a man who manifests his midlife crisis by using his library card to learn how to build a homemade submarine? And if you can prove your reasonably doubting wife wrong to boot—even better!

And on Paradise Valley, the best song is Who You Love (Paper Doll is a close second). John Mayer’s and Katy Perry’s voices just work so well together; I love her almost yodeling at the end.

Best TV Show: Hacks, Season 3

When I watched the first episode of Hacks, a few years ago, I got the same feeling I can remember having, way back in the Fall of 2009, when I watched the very first episode of Modern Family: “Oh, this good! It’s got a sitcomy vibe, but it’s good.” And so I’ve been a fan of Hacks the last couple years, and it makes me laugh. I was happily surprised to see it back for a third season last year, as I felt like the story arcs where finished at the end of the second season, and I thought we were done with Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels. But I’m so glad I was so wrong. Because this season was by far their best.

It accomplished something that is very difficult for a 27min comedy to do: not just make you laugh, but make you cry.  Well, it made me cry, which might be easier than making the proverbial ‘you’ cry.[1] But I think it still speaks to how fully fleshed out our characters are by now; we’re fully invested in the toxic and touching relationship shared these two hilarious, ambitious, and narcissistic women.

Season 3 ends with a twist, and of the perfect variety: one which manages to be genuinely surprising when it happens, completely obvious in hindsight once it does, hilarious, upsetting, and pregnant with possibility and consequence going forward. It literally made me gasp. Hacks is smart, it’s funny, it’s in full command, and it never treats its audience as fools—all of which is rare in a comedy. It was my favourite show of the year.

Runner Up: Industry Season 3

Last year, in my review of Succession as the best TV show, I called Industry its OC version. I may still stand by that, for the most part. But this year, it really felt like it became a more serious show. And that’s because it has started punishing some of its central characters, and it’s not pulling its punches. Again, there were some moments that made me gasp in this season (if you watched it, I’m sure you can guess which ones). The last couple years, we’ve just been wanting to see their world come crashing down all around them, and now we finally get to. This was probably the show this year that I was most excited for each week, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.

Honorable Mentions: Trying & Bad Sisters

I’ve been a big fan of Trying for years. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s not afraid to get real, and sad. Beginning with the premise of a couple trying to get pregnant, then navigating the alienating adoption agencies, to raising a toddler and teen, now in its 4^th season (which also ended with a great twist), it’s still finding ways to naturally unfold itself, and still seems pregnant with possibility.

The first season of Bad Sisters was superb; I can’t recommend it enough. I was surprised to see it back for a second season, given how perfectly I’d thought the first had been wrapped up, but I trusted show-runner Sharon Horgan had a good reason to be coming back. This second season did not reach the same heights, but it was still good. While I’m on the topic of all these great comedies, if you haven’t seen Catastrophe, with Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, you must.  

Best TV Episode: Baby Reindeer, Episode 6

Everybody loved this show, and it was great. But its 6^th episode, the one with the long monologue, gave us truly something special. And not just because it was a superb monologue, which it was. What made it so brilliant, and so unique, was the fact that the monologue was not used to give us, the viewer, any new information. Not only does the monologue not give us any new information, it actually tells us about stuff we’ve already seen. Good writing is supposed to show, not tell.  And here. they make the choice to tell what they’ve already shown. Not to reveal some hidden twist, or draw our attention to something we didn’t notice before, but just to simply state it in plain language. It shouldn’t work! It should feel completely tedious and redundant. And yet, it is probably the absolute climax of the entire season.

That’s what makes this monologue so fascinating to me: like all truly great art, it breaks a supposed cardinal rule, and does so in such a way that makes it much better. Just like the audience in the scene itself, we watch Donny’s breakdown on stage totally transfixed, we are hanging on very word. But unlike the audience, we as the viewers are not learning anything new. Indeed, as viewers, we have been privy to Donny’s inner monologue the entire time, even while the events now being recounted were first shown to us. So this monologue should be doubly boring. But it’s just the opposite: it’s exponentially more exciting because they’re taking us even deeper into his mind, they’re saying, ‘hey, here is yet another layer of subjectivity, another layer of richness and horror from which to peer out at the world.’ Finally, a lesser writer, who knew they had an amazing, gut-punch of a monologue like this, would try to find some way to save it for the final episode. But if you’re brave, you put something like this in your penultimate episode, and then you force yourself to find a way to reckon with it in the next. Anyways, have a watch for yourself. Warning: the first time I watched it, I think I forgot to breathe. (There are spoilers for the season in this clip.)

Compare that to another show from this year called Disclaimer, which also prominently features a far more inferior monologue, also disclosing a past rape. This monologue, which happens in the 7^th and final episode (see, I told you!) is supposed to be the climax of the season. And Alfonso Cuarón follows all the rules he’s supposed to: he’s using flashbacks, he’s revealing new information, he’s got Cate Blanchett crying. And yet, it falls flat. The information revealed is the wrong kind of twist, one which comes out of nowhere precisely because it is not carefully based upon what has come before, indeed it does violence to all that precedes, for the cheap thrill of the twist. We as the viewer are trying to incorporate this new information, but we can’t really do so, and certainly not in the cathartic and revelatory way are apparently meant to. Because we are instead thinking, ‘wait, is this actually real, or is just another one of the lies we are supposed to see through?’ Not good, not satisfying. (I can’t find a clip of this monologue online.)

Runner Up: The Bear, Season 3 Episode 1

I didn’t love this third season of the Bear, and I’m kind of just over watching Jeremy Allen White look forlorn while cooking. It’s not enough for me anymore. But this season still had a couple great episodes, such as Napkins (S3E6). But it was really the premiere that got me. It begins with just interspersed images, telling the background stories of different characters, over a montage, with almost no dialogue. After about 6 minutes of this, I turned to Bre and said, laughing, “They should do the entire episode like this!” At about the 10 minute mark I said, “Wait, are they really going to do the entire episode like this?” After about 14 minutes I said, “Oh my god, they’re going to do the entire episode like this!” And they did. For a show that is defined by its loud cacophonous conversations, its quick pace and disorienting editing, it was such a brave, interesting choice to just come out for the premiere with this slow, almost meditative episode, punctuated with the sparsest of dialogue. It was a special episode of TV from last year, and I found it quite affecting.

Best Movie: Dune Part 2

When I saw the Oscar nominations for best picture and best director (yes, I still pay attention to that stuff, even while the nation slides into its own strange, stupid blend of tech-bro, oligarchical, authoritarianism), I thought I must have missed something. Had Villeneuve gotten cancelled? Did he sexually assault someone? Had he spoken out about Palestinians’ right to not be genocided, and angered the you-know-whose? Because otherwise I couldn’t understand why Denis and his Dune were not nominated. I know, it’s basically a superhero movie, but c’mon, it was also so much more than that too. The rare action blockbuster that’s beloved by critics; it’s like eating fast-food, but it’s also healthy. It was so good. Nobody had more fun in the movie theater watching anything else last year. I went three times. After the second time, I texted my friend, “Denis Villeneuve is the only Hollywood celebrity for whom, if I heard they’d died, I would genuinely feel upset.” And that may actually be true.

My favourite scene was the Fremen war tribunal, where Paul declares himself to be a prophet. I know, I know, that’s what every film-bro with a youtube channel will tell you too, but let me share my specific reason why. First of all, Stilgar was my favourite character. For me, he is the spine of the movie. Moving things forward, bringing the pathos, bringing the laughs. Apparently immediately after watching the film, Steven Spielberg picked up his phone and called Javier Bardem and told him he was amazing, which I would have done too, if only…

Despite being the funniest character, Stilgar is also the most tragic. Ostensibly, he is Paul’s most devout believer. But the entire movie, he shows himself to be very invested in convincing other’s of his truth, that Paul is the prophet. And it is pointed out that he has been wrong about this kind of thing before, that his faith leads him astray, to misinterpret. And so once we know this, his supposed strong faith and his interest in convincing others strikes a different cord: perhaps it is all motivated not by omnipotent faith, but a small seed of doubt. He wants (needs!) to convince others as a way of shoring up his own faith, and repressing those internal whispers of doubt. But when Paul finally declares himself a prophet , Stilgar doesn’t even bother to look around at how everyone else is reacting—he doesn’t need their affirmation anymore. He just drops to his knees, and like Abraham to God, says ‘Here I am,’ and asks, ‘what do you demand of me?’

I think that we all must be capable of reaching a similar moment. When we are confronted with inexplicable miracle after miracle, until there comes a moment when it is actually irrational to go on believing in the type of worldview you did before, and what becomes the rational thing to acknowledge is that you are in the presence of something undeniably supernatural, that this is actually happening. It’s a fascinating moment in the movie, and I think Villeneuve and Bardem captured it perfectly. And yes, it made me cry.

Speaking of monologues, Chalamet delivers what has to be one of the most moving monologues spoken in a fictitious language. Is that a short list? I don’t know, probably. The only other one I can really think of off the top of my head is this one by Khal Drogo in the first season of Game of Thrones. As I rewatch it now, it’s really striking just how similar the two scenes are.  But compared to my boy Timmy, look how over the top Jason Momoa is, spraying spittle, jumping around, beating his chest. Drogo has no sense of how to harness the power of quite, as Atreides does, using low speech, and then mixing it in with shouting and chest beating. I know who I’d want to conquer alongside, given the choice. Compare for yourself:

Atreides

Drogo

Now, while claiming that Dune Part 2 was my favourite movie from last year, let me just mention one way in which I think it failed fantastically. And that was with Chani. Yes, she was bad ass as a Fremen mujahideen warrior. But much more than that, she was supposed to be the show’s moral compass, especially as Paul lost his own. And this was something Villeneuve said again and again was important to him, and something he thought Frank Herbert had failed to communicate clearly enough—that Paul is the bad guy. Villeneuve wanted to fix this, and he was going to use Chani to do so, elevating her from a rather minor character in the books, into an alternative perspective upon Paul’s ascent, which is also a descent.

And what is so interesting to me is that Villeneuve pretty clearly fails at his explicit goal. He becomes seduced by Paul. (It’s almost like his failure in this way is a metacommentary on the all-consuming allure of power.) In the final scenes, when Chani storms out of the room to ride a sandworm into the sunset, and looks into the camera with those eyes full of scorn and righteous indignation, we as the viewers should be right there with her, we too should be angry at Paul, and supportive of Chani. But are we?

I know I wasn’t. And judging by the amount of men spilling out of the theaters chanting “Lisan al-Gaib” and pumping their fists in the air—precisely the kind of men to whom Villeneuve claimed he wanted show, ‘hey, Paul is the bad guy!’—I don’t think I was the only who felt this way. Instead of being on Chani’s side, we kind of feel like she’s ruining the party. Can’t she just get with the program? Yes, Paul is essentially hijacking an entire culture in order to carry out a private revenge plot, and that’s reprehensible, but doesn’t Chani realize you can’t make a space omelette without initiating a galactic genocide? Anyway, luckily Villeneuve will have one more crack at it, to really drive the message home, and apparently he has already begun working on the script!  

Best Standup Comedy: Ali Wong’s Single Lady

We got to watch this live at the Wiltern in LA, unfortunately just a couple days before the version she taped for her special. I don’t think I’m biased by having attended live—it really was the most hilarious standup of last year. What made it so impressive to me, making it stand out in a year of pretty great standup, was that what she delivers here is one continues narrative. It’s all one big story. So she’s not just taking us through all the best jokes and stories she happened to come with during the past two years, all her hottest takes on a range of topics. She is telling one story—her divorce and its aftermath—and everything she says is about that. And it’s amazing.

Wong has found a way of incorporating her own kind of sexual lewd body humour, so often the domain of male comedians, to great effect, and inflecting it with this incisive psychological perspective, which adds another layer of humour. My favourite joke of hers? “You know what energy I want men to bring to the bedroom? Gratitude…Yeah, you stay down there, you lucky, mediocre man, you!” (I can’t find any good clips of her routine. It’s on Netflix.)

Compare this to Jim Gaffigan’s “The Skinny,” also of this year. It’s also great, but he allows himself to jump from story to story, as most comedians do. I’m just happy he’s finally allowing himself to get a bit darker the past few years.

Runner Up: Jacqueline Novak, Get On Your Knees

Now, I’m just realizing that perhaps I was biased by attending in person, because there was another hilarious special from last year, full of hyper-intellectualized body humour (if you can imagine what that would be like), and also revolving around only a single topic, and that was Jacqueline Novak’s “Get On Your Knees” (also on Netflix, and again I can’t find a great clip).

I know it is part of her comedic persona, but her delivery is so fast that, at times, it almost feels as if she’s doing herself a disservice. All these great jokes, which someone like Chris Rock would take 15 seconds just to set up by repeating three times, Novak just rattles them off, and is already onto the next before you’ve fully processed the last one. She’s my runner up.

Best Book: The Book of My Lives, by Aleksandar Hemon

For the last few years, all I’ve really wanted to read is writers writing about their own lives: mercilessly turning their incomparable powers of observation upon themselves, relentlessly burrowing deep into their personal psyche, and returning to the surface having crafted it all into a narrative, very often revelatory. These include books such as Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19, or V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. Hemon’s book is one of these books.

Across 17 separate essays, organized more or less in chronological fashion, he tells the story of his life, from growing up in Sarajevo, boyhood soccer games, then the war, moving to Chicago, trying to make it as a writer, falling in and out love, getting married, starting a family. His final essay, “The Aquarium,” which recounts the events immediately after a tumor is found inside the brain of his 9-month old daughter, will break you. Here is a link to it, where it first appeared, in the New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/the-aquarium

On a similar note, I’ve just now started reading Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote pretty soon after her husband suffered “a massive coronary event” at the dinner table, and died right in front of her. Less than a year later, and just as the book was about to be published, Didion’s daughter died too.

Embarrassingly, I had not read any Didion until last year.  But I determined to do so after hearing a repeat interview of hers with Eleanor Wachtel, from 2005. At the time, Didion’s daughter had just died, and Wachtel expected her to cancel the interview. Instead, she wanted to talk about it, before a live audience. Not only did she speak eloquently about her deep grief, but she was actually, somehow, very funny. Wachtel mentions, “You write in your book about how you once went with your husband on a vacation to Hawaii, in lieu of getting a divorce…” and the crowd chuckles. Didion responds, “Yes, well it seems to me that, in any marriage, you’re always doing something in lieu of getting a divorce…” and the crowd explodes with laughter. I found the interview very moving. Here’s a link if you would like to listen (you can press play below just below her picture).

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/the-legacy-of-joan-didion-the-influential-stylist-inspired-generations-of-writers-1.4026521

In still a similar vein, I also read and enjoyed this year Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, the autobiographical meditation on life and love written by the British philosopher after she was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her at age 48. Among some of my favourite lines were those where she explores the ambivalences at the core of love. Such as ambivalences of power: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy” (60); “there is no love without power, we are at the mercy of others, and we have others at our mercy”(106). Or such as ambivalences of feelings: “We knew we wanted each other in the way those who become lovers do—with simultaneously a supernatural conviction of unexpressed mutual desire and a mortal unsureness concerning declaration and consummation” (68).

After her cancer completely erodes her bowels, she undergoes a colostomy to get a stoma, “a surrogate rectum and anus” (93). And in order to introduce the topic, which she goes on to discuss for about the next 7 pages, she begins by stating: “I want to talk about shit—the hourly transfiguration of our lovely eating of the sun” (94). You will not, I promise you, ever come across a better definition of what shit is than that one.

Runner Up: No Name In The Street, by James Baldwin

Elif Batuman wrote on her Substack that she thought this was one of Baldwin’s angriest books—good enough for me! And if you want to feel angry at America, which I think most of us—as thinking, feeling beings—have a right to be, then this is a great book for you to read. Writing in the aftermath of the assassinations of both Malcom X and MLK, Baldwin notes that, “white America remains unable to believe that black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young” (165). “White children, in the main, whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded—about themselves and the world they live in” (128).

Well, those white children Baldwin wrote about have now grown up, and we are currently suffering and straining under the yoke of their angry, mean, and emboldened resurgent white supremacy; if “the truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people will find very hard to swallow,” then Baldwin’s books, even after all this time, still prove themselves to be the necessary tonic. And of course, his continued relevance is not at all surprising, because although we live our lives believing and hoping that we are free, we are all of us being carried along in “history’s ass-pocket” (61).

Let’s not end with anger and domination, though, as there is love and freedom in Baldwin’s book too. After all, “every human being is an unprecedented miracle.” And if that’s true, then it is important that “one tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become” (10).“Because [when] you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before—perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see—and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because now you have a home—your lover’s arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world” (23).

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[1] If you must know, the part that made me cry is when Ava reveals that she has been working on material for Deborah, despite not being asked to, and despite being free to work on her own stuff now; she needs Deborah as her comedic muse, just as Deborah needs Ava in so many ways too.