Once again, as was the case eight years ago, I find this year’s list to be leaning heavily on women. This time, however, I didn’t plan it that way. It’s just how it happened to work out. I suppose that’s where I’ve invested whatever hope I have for the future, long or short-term.
Nothing else to add, at least for now, except that I couldn’t get to as much out there as I would have liked.
Oh and, as always, these are in no particular order:
Colored Television – Percival Everett’s James was the Novel of the Year on most lists and, at this writing, it’s nestling in the upper tier of the New York Times Best-Seller List. It deserves every accolade it’s gotten. But so does the latest novel by Everett’s equally accomplished wife, Danzy Senna, who has built her own impressive reputation for acerbic comedies-of-manners as they evolve – or don’t – in the expanding new world of multiracial diversity in the USA. The protagonist of her latest novel is, like its author, a mixed-race novelist and college professor. Her name is Jane Gibson who, with her bohemian artist husband Lenny and their two children, ekes out a life on relatively meagre resources by inhabiting borrowed homes in fashionable SoCal neighborhoods. She puts all her faith and ambition in what she is certain is the Great American Mulatto Novel. (Yes, she prefers “mulatto” to any other term. “’Biracial’ could be any old thing. Korean and Panamanian or Chinese and Egyptian. But a mulatto is always specifically a mulatto.”) When this sprawling tome is spurned by publishers, Jane decides she’s been wasting her energies on literature and, as was the case with generations of writers before her, dives into the gauzy maelstrom of Hollywood screenwriting, specifically by finding space at a writers’ table developing a TV “prestige” sitcom about the “mulatto” experience. The narrative twists, however clever and trenchant, aren’t what keep your head in the game; it’s the streams of zingers, aphorisms, and socio-cultural observations, whether its Jane’s withering assessment of her students’ reading tastes to the mores of hosting her daughter’s birthday party among the L.A. hoi polloi. As a bonus, Senna’s book also serves as a guide not just to navigating one’s way through a multi-culti life, but to writing itself. And, for that matter, teaching writing. (“You couldn’t teach a student by assigning Toni Morrison, it would only create bad imitations.”) Laugh, and learn.
Sally Jenkins – So many of my friends dropped their Washington Post subscriptions after Jeff Bezos’s non-endorsement for president. While understanding the impulse, I insisted that, however exasperating the Post’s direction on this and other matters, there were still people working there who needed and merited our abiding support. Without the Post, for instance, you’d deprive yourself of beholding a great American sportswriter in the midst of a ferocious hot streak. Jenkins has over decades sustained a level of performance as awe-inspiring as any of the superstar athletes she writes about, whether she’s unspooling long-form pieces like the panoramic, vividly rendered account of legendary bull rider J.B. Mauney’s decelerated-but-still-engaged life after a broken neck or firing column after column taking dead solid aim at Received Wisdom wherever it’s stinking up the joint. She places the blame for the hot mess college athletics have become on the institutions that forget or ignore their educational missions. She was laser-like in deconstructing police overreaction to a pregame traffic infraction by Miami Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill (“…a needless escalation not because of Hill’s conduct, but that of those chesty cops, their belts jingling with tools of submission and voices that demanded bootlicks…”). While the Tom Brady roast delighted millions, Jenkins was decidedly not amused by the “hammy punchlines that fell like refrigerators hitting sidewalks.” And she was, as usual, smarter than almost everybody else in her field when assessing Bill Belichick’s decision to forsake the klieg-light glare of the NFL for the NCAA: “Belichick’s longtime permafrost barrier is less about aloofness than about his suspicion of the corrosive effects of popularity.” Jenkins has been a perennial finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and I thought her engrossing, deeply moving 2023 takeout on the bond between Chris Evert-Martina Navratilova should have finally put her over the top. Then again, she doesn’t need anybody’s prizes to certify her preeminence – not as much as you need to pay more attention to her day-to-day output.
Beyonce, Cowboy Carter (Parkwood/Columbia) – So who needs the CMA anyway? Those are for country-&-western albums, and this was the kind of pure pop product that took in too many multitudes to be contained by any genre. More than anything, as many others pointed out, Beyonce herself was, and is, her own genre. And whatever this album’s head-swiveling popularity and impact on the marketplace and its multiple platforms, I don’t think enough was made of Ms. Knowles’s valiant determination to declare that she, too, sings America – as if the opening track, “American Requiem” didn’t forcefully assert such intention. Nothing about this Mother of All Crossover Projects felt strained or overstuffed – except, maybe, for the Texas radio station motif that almost wore out its welcome. Overall, it’s a cordial, enthusiastic house party with an eclectic guest list (Miley Cyrus, Shaboozey, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Tanner Adell, Rhiannon Giddens, Willie Nelson, Jon Baptiste, Linda Martell, among others) and a generosity of spirit that makes the album’s nay-sayers seem even pettier — and more bewildering. The election results have too many convinced that the country’s regressing deeper into the swamps of polarization. But I think Cowboy Carter’s arrival is the clearest indication we have this year that the wider, more diverse world the reactionaries are so afraid of has already arrived – and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Hacks – Somehow you knew that the perverse bond between Vegas standup comedy institution Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her on-and-off-again muse-for-hire Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) was going to need more than just two seasons to evolve. And the third and best season of this series raised the stakes in bringing this oddest of odd couples back together after Deborah cut Ava loose (supposedly) for the latter’s own sake. And it seems, for a time, to have worked out, with Deborah riding a wave of popularity with newer younger audiences who’ve seen her unexpected Netflix hit and Ava scoring a dream gig writing for a satiric news digest. But when the late-night hosting job of Deborah’s long-deferred dreams suddenly becomes attainable, she decides that only Ava’s writing can deliver her to the finish line. So, for better and worse, they reconnect with their respective insecurities and unruly yearnings entwined once again in a fitful tango of codependence and ambition. The sometimes-sordid things they do along the way to get what they want smacks around our sympathies. But there are too damn many things in the culture that pander to simplistic good/evil dualities. Ava’s moments of insight and compassion may not always arrive in a timely manner, but when they do, you wish you could hire her for some odd jobs around the office. And it’s hard to stay mad at Deborah when she makes this rationale for her heat-seeking campaign: “Anything I want to do I have to do it now. Or else I’ll never do it. That’s the worst part about getting older.” No pathos here. Just another shot of raw, aching truth that’ll keep us coming back to these fascinating, damaged women.
Rebel Ridge – I started watching this on Netflix after several people I trust urged me to do so. When it began with an innocent, unarmed Black man on a bicycle getting rousted and harassed by small-town white men in uniform, I thought: Do I really need to go through this mess again (especially this year, or this decade?) But it didn’t take long for Jeremy Saulnier’s contemporary western to pull me all the way in. Which says a lot, given how totally done I’ve become with this kind of drama (especially in real life). The movie is not only smart about orchestrating its martial arts sequences and chase montages, but also about the jujitsu of legal procedure and the pressure points that won’t always, or easily, submit to the bully-bro tactics of overentitled cops. One more thing: Aaron Pierre, as the unstoppable marine vet kicking ass for justice, is a bona fide star and I hope the Green Lantern franchise, such as it is, treats him much better than it did Ryan Reynolds.
The Paris Olympics – They had me, literally, at hello with Celine Dion’s spectral performance of “Hymne a L’Amour” climaxing a moist, stirring opening ceremony. Dion’s spellbinding resolve was sustained in the steely “I’m Baaack!” sang-froid of Simone Biles throughout the women’s gymnastics competition, whether dispatching the competition or supporting her teammates. The men’s basketball competition honored the elder generation of superstars like LeBron James and Stephan Curry while also acting as a showcase for NextGen stars like France’s Victor Wembanyana and Japan’s Kawamura Yuki. Much was made of Katey Ledecky’s four-pack of swimming medals, and even more was made by the pool of local hero “King” (or is it “Roi”?) Leon Marchand. But as always, I was especially riveted to track-and-field, especially the American women sprinters. If there’s one YouTube clip that I never get tired of watching from the games, it’s of Sha ‘Carri Richardson’s come-from-behind anchor leg of the 4X100-meter relay. That millisecond before she breaks the tape is the best victory glance at the competition since Secretariat’s jockey Ron Turcotte sneaked an over-the-shoulder look at how far ahead they were in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.
Desi Lydic – The big story with The Daily Show this year was Jon Stewart’s return to the anchor desk, albeit in a more limited role. With characteristic generosity, Stewart’s still ceding lots of space to the show’s rotating anchors who have been doing just fine without him. They’re all great, but I think Lydic, who joined the franchise back in 2015, has become one of its stealth weapons. And it’s not just because she had the season’s single best zinger, aimed in Tucker Carlson’s direction the day he was dismissed from Fox News. I’m thinking of a relatively routine night for the show, when she surgically took apart what was supposed to be a major policy address by the once-and-future-president on health care and laid out its sloppy, threadbare components for all to see and hear. I turned on the radio and television the morning after waiting for somebody, anybody else to apply even a little of Lydic’s scorched-earth skepticism and deconstruction to this speech. Crickets. At least, that’s all I’d heard. This, by default, made her my favorite broadcast journalist of the 2024 campaign with no one else even close. I’m not expecting the next couple years (at least) to be fun. But I’m at least encouraged that Lydic will still be ready to apply the scythe and flares to Trump’s foggier rhetoric — if “rhetoric” is what you can call it.
The Sympathizer – The culture-at-large is in love with international intrigue to a degree that it hasn’t been since the mid-20th century days of Counterinsurgency, Sean Connery’s 007, and Mutually Assured Destruction. A partial, up-to-date list of global duplicity to be found on streams includes Black Doves, The Agency, Day of the Jackal, The Diplomat, Lioness, and Slow Horses, the latter of which I am so devoted to that I inhale the Mick Herron novels so I can stay out in front of whatever happens to its motley crew of misfits after each of the series’ four seasons. But even that show hasn’t messed with my head like the HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s award-winning novel, set during and after the Vietnam War, about the perilous destiny of a double agent (a most excellent Hoa Xuande) spying for the communist North while serving as an officer with the South’s army. The novel claims both Ralph Ellison and John Le Carré as its guiding spirits and the series is more faithful to Nguyen’s dark seriocomic narrative than the agent, known only as The Captain, is to either of his warring masters. He carries his divided soul with him after the Fall of Saigon to late-1970s Los Angeles where the war goes on among his fellow refugees, notably his onetime general (Toan Le), now a liquor-store owner still dreaming of somehow reversing the war’s outcome. Robert Downey Jr., one of the show’s executive producers, plays (riotously) multiple roles as white men with undue, malign influence on The Captain’s life, including a sybaritic CIA cowboy, a doltish California congressman, and a megalomaniacal filmmaker using the Captain for technical advice on a Vietnam War epic. Some viewers complained about the story’s multiple time-shifts and how the narrative didn’t always play fair with the Captain’s motivations – and everybody else’s. All of which, of course, was what I liked most about it.
When The Clock Broke –John Ganz’s account of the 1992 presidential campaign was published three days before Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race and declared support for his vice president Kamala Harris. The convergence now seems like ages ago, especially when one remembers how suddenly plausible it seemed at that moment that the election results would signal the end — or at least the beginning of the end – of the dismal era that Ganz contends was set in motion by the tempest of reactionary resentment and populist rage abetted by such luminaries of the era as Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Daryl Gates, Rudy Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, and others. So omnipresent was this force that even the election’s eventual winner Bill Clinton pandered to it by hanging Black rapper-activist Sister Souljah out to dry in public. Ganz’s mordant, thorough account spares no one in complicity and even brings in John “The Dapper Don” Gotti as a tabloid paradigm of the mob capo as authoritarian ideal. As I wrote this past summer, you’ll find just about everything there is to say about how we ended up in this perilous time for our democratic republic; everything, that is, except a clearly marked exit.
Zoe Saldana – As more than one of my friends insist, there’s nobody better than Saldana at evoking the state of being sick-and-tired-of-everybody-else’s-bullshit, especially when, as the CIA commando in Lioness known only as Joe, she has to be Tough Mommy to her daughters in split-level Virginia and to the grimy, smart-alecky roughnecks she leads into morally ambiguous dark-ops missions. Her character in Emilia Perez is scarcely under less pressure than Joe; she’s a Mexico City lawyer recruited by a notorious drug cartel leader to help navigate his safe passage to a new life as a woman. In both cases, Saldana is a flash point, barely keeping rage and hysteria at bay. She not always at the center of things, but nothing consequential happens, good or bad, without her. While I yearn for the cooler, drier archetype of existential heroism I grew up with, Saldana’s mercurial, intense variation somehow feels closer to where our heads should be now: doing whatever it takes to get through whatever perils get dumped in our pathway
