So many shows, so little time. Sorry Shogun and The Penguin and Da Bear. I’m very movie focused in my day-to-day media consumption so unless a show has an insane premise or more buzz than the beehive that killed Macaulay Culkin in My Girl, it’s gonna end up in the “To Do” pile.

I want to note that I did start The Penguin and The Sympathizer but I don’t have that binge me in anymore. Purge? Yes. Binge? No. Here are all the shows that escaped the purge.

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Well, congratulations Hollywood, you did it. You’ve fractured the landscape of television so completely that if you’re not watching something in the same room as someone else, no one has any idea what the hell you’re talking about anymore. And it’s not just about community: TV criticism has all but been killed off and with so many streaming services now (and the crackdown on password sharing), it’s too expensive to even try to keep up with everything anyway, so the sense of urgency when it comes to shows is just gone. It’s so bad, we decided to do top fives this year instead of 10 because this has become a futile and stupid gesture. And the saddest thing of all? While this is all happening, creatives are still making a lot of good TV, arguably too much good stuff!

I have got a long list of shows that are supposed to be great that I just never made time for, shows like Bad Monkey, The Diplomat, Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show, Shrinking, Silo, and Slow Horses. And another list of franchise shows I definitely, actively want to watch like The Acolyte, Fallout, House of the Dragon, Penguin, Rings of Power, and Skeleton Crew. But fuck it, they just never happened for me in 2024 because I was too busy watching One Piece at the time or I wasn’t subscribed to the right streaming service at the time or I was still too burnt out on meaningless Star Wars prequel movies stretched out into miniseries.

Can we come back from this? I sure hope so. I still haven’t given up on my watchlist. Maybe we just need everyone in America/the world to start a blog and do annual top tens? Or suddenly all try to care about the Emmys at least as much as we care about the Oscars? Maybe putting some effort into thinking about the media we consumed all year instead of just letting an algorithm tell us (or an AI in Spotify Wrapped’s case) could be good for us all? In the meantime, let’s at least try to keep in mind that while the era of peak TV might be over, that doesn’t mean the medium has been reduced to just reality junk and mindless reruns.

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Every year I start this post making excuses for why my list isn’t more “hip”. Last year I talked about finding peace in my growingly mainstream lists. This year I feel the same BUT I want to make a vow that I’ll never start another one of these lists with apologizing. I put a lot of time into movies, podcasts and books. What, I’m supposed to be Anthony Fantano too? No more. Welcome to my basic bitch era.

As for “What Kind of Year was 2024 for Music?” I have no fucking idea. A lot of pop. Like, real talk if we didn’t all sleep on Chappell Roan last year and her debut came out this year then she would 1000% be my number one. I got a couple of pop princesses but 2024 was Chappell’s year. Anyways here’s some bullshit:

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To paraphrase Colin, while TV and movies were dealt another brutal blow by the strikes last year, the music industry felt fully back in swing as we closed out the first half of this decade. Finally, it seemed like there was more going on than songs about isolation during the pandemic or leftover relics from the 2010s! Perhaps not coincidentally, this corresponded with era of girl pop hitting its zenith (or perhaps merely just new heights) with Spotify’s data showing that women dominated the lists of most-streamed artists, songs, and albums of 2024. On top of that, long-dormant artists like Camera Obscura and Jamie xx showed up with pretty good new albums and others, like The Smile and Charley Crockett, couldn’t help but put out multiple complete LPs. I’ll just say it, 2024 was an embarrassment of riches!

But here’s what’s freaking me out: at the end of every year, I scoop up a bunch of albums from other “best of” lists and cram them into my ears as fast as possible so I can make the actual, definitive, best top 10 list on the Internet (not really, usually I crap out and make a big apologetic post). The thing is, at some point in late 2023, I definitely did stream The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and yet not only did Chappell Roan *not* make last year’s list, I totally forgot about her until the Guts World Tour turned this sleeper hit into a smash.

Of course, the second time around I fell in love with Chappell Roan like everyone else, and her follow-up single “Good Luck, Babe!” was 100% my #1 summer jam, despite allegations of it being a BRAT summer. But there are precious months where I could have been way more on top of my shit instead of wasting my time on the mental gymnastics that could justify THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT as really good, actually. So what does that mean? What lesson have I learned from this humbling experience? Listen to new music more times, I guess. Don’t be a boring old guy? Oh no, more on that later!

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Much like the rest of 2024, I’m still not quite sure what to make of the year in music, even though it is officially, entirely, completely over. Once again, we here at Mildly Pleased would like to take more of a moratorium approach to a year after it’s completely dead and gone. None of this posting a Best of the Year List in November nonsense. Or maybe we just increasingly need the extra time for list-making when our lives continue to make keeping engaged with new music, TV, and movies harder by the year.

Anyways, as usual, music was the easiest medium for me to feel like I was on top of, especially when this year had the most to offer in terms of rewarding releases, since TV and movies were still reeling from multiple industry-wide strikes that happened last year. Still, I sometimes felt a bit on the outside looking in on the year in music, just because this year felt so pop-dominant (thanks, the algorithm). And while I did appreciate pretty much all of the year’s big pop releases, not a ton of them will be making my list. Instead, a lot of it will once again be pretty indie-centric, even if this year didn’t feel quite as rewarding for releases just a bit below the radar. Continue reading →

Early on in 2023, before a very necessary pair of strikes screwed everything up, it seemed like we had a really easy theme all set up for my annual wrap-up: unfinished business. Between the likes of Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One we had an absolute glut of (perhaps arrogantly conceived) half movies. And then there were all the franchise pay-offs on the other end of the spectrum, John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and plenty more were all slated to wrap-up some other long-running stories. Then things went off the rails and we all started to wonder if the recovery we all thought we were promised in 2022 would never actually come to pass.

Well, all that chaos aside, I’m sticking with that theme. Because I’ve got some real unfinished business. I thought I had a pretty good handle on 2023 until I started seeing my friends’ lists and award nominations and realized I actually still had a ton of homework to do. And then I went and had a really weird couple of weeks that sapped my motivation to pay attention to movies. So I created a living document here. And I’m gonna keep trying to work on 2023 as we continue on into the new year. You got a problem with that? Too bad!
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