I have my reservations about year-end lists—though I contributed to several, including HitFix’s TV Critics poll and Salon’s year in review, which will be out on Friday, this fall—because I have trouble distilling my pleasure in popular culture down to numerical rankings, much less picking ten of the things I liked in any category of entertainment out of the many things I loved this year. But I’ve had an awful lot of fun at the movies, in front of my television, and with my nose buried in books this year. So here are 65 of my favorite—not necessarily the best, but the things that gave me the most joy and food for thought—television shows, movies, books, documentaries, and people, places and things from 2012, with the caveat that I haven’t seen a number of things I expect to like very much, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. If you’re looking for a fun way to while away the hours over the next week—I’m off until January 2—all of these things come highly recommended.

Television

Alphas: The most charming superhero show anywhere on television, with one of the smartest, insightful portrayals of a character on the autism spectrum anywhere on television.

Appropriate Adult: Dominic West is terrifying as British serial killer Fred West in this British mini about West and the woman assigned to be his Appropriate Adult, a figure present at police interviews with people who may not be ruled competent.

Avatar: The Legend of Korra: This time out, the Avatar gets to be a teenage girl named Korra, and Republic City became the setting for terrific explorations of political extremism, self-sacrifice, and the greater good.

Bent: Cancelled far too soon and a victim of NBC’s scheduling department, this charming look at a stressed-out lawyer, her contractor, his poser of a father, and her daughter was one of the nicest shows I’ve seen on television in a long time—and that’s a compliment.

Breaking Bad: If only for Jesse Pinkman desperately trying to complement Skyler White’s cooking, I would have put the best show on television on this list. But as Breaking Bad winds down, the show has only gotten more visually potent, and more emotionally and morally terrifying.

Community: It could have ended this season and been marvelous—the video game! The Law and Order parody!—but I’m glad the Greendale study group will be back in February.

Game of Thrones: Do I need to justify this one? HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novels is beginning to edit them in smart ways, and has just gotten more emotionally rich and visually ambitious as it’s gone on.

Girls: The most emotionally precise show on television, with Robyn and accurate women’s health information in the mix.

Happy Endings: Eliza Coupe is a demented genius, and so is the show she stars on, the best live-action cartoon anywhere on television.

Homeland: It danced a Saul-inspired Hora all over my soul in the back half of the season. But damn if I don’t love seeing this group of actors at work, even if I wish they were being given material more fitting their talents.

The Hour: The show The Newsroom desperately wanted to be, and the one we all need so badly about what it takes to do truly hard, ambitious reporting, and to get it on the air.

Justified: The best exploration, anywhere in pop culture, of what it means to be a Southern man. Also, the funniest drama on television. Also, Walton Goggins.

Key & Peele: The best Obama impression anywhere, and a great, nuanced exploration of race, faith, and gender.

The L.A. Complex: Andra Fuller should get an Emmy nomination for his performance of coming-out-rapper Kaldrick King. And everyone who wants to know how Hollywood works should be watching.

Lost Girl: The heir to Charmed in the best, cheesiest, bisexual-succubus-y way possible.

Nashville: Team Juliette all the way, in this fascinating exploration of how the process of making music actually works.

Parks and Recreation: Leslie’s road to City Council was smartly observed and beautifully acted, and writer Aisha Muharrar is crushing it in the episodes she’s written this fall.

Political Animals: A soapy female power fantasy, and prep for Hillary 2016.

Sons of Anarchy: There’s still too much plot in this FX drama, but it’s never felt more like the brutal update to Hamlet it was always meant to be, and the strong cast is hitting its stride.

Treme: This was the year I gave in to the profound sensual pleasures of David Simon’s meditation on integrity and kindness in post-Katrina New Orleans.
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The sports world has been filled with tributes to the victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre, in which 27 people, including 20 children, were shot and killed. But while many athletes have chosen to honor the victims on their shoes and leagues have held moments of silence before games, two legendary men’s college basketball coaches took the opportunity to speak out about gun control.

Nobody would have faulted Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim for turning his post-game press conference into a celebration Monday, after he became just the third men’s Division I coach to win 900 games in a career. Instead, he chose to take on a topic that he knew would “offend some people” and called for tough restrictions on assault weapons:

“This will probably offend some people. If we in this country as Americans cannot get the people that represent us to do something about firearms, we are a sad, sad society. I’m a hunter. I’ve hunted. I’m not talking about rifles. That’s fine. If one person in this world — the NRA president, anybody — can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots in the thing. This is our fault. This is my fault and your fault. All of your faults if we don’t get out and do something about this.”

“If we can’t get this thing done — I’m with the mayor of New York City [Michael Bloomberg] — if we can’t get this thing done, I don’t know what kind of country we have. This is about us. This isn’t about the president or those other people down there [in DC]. We have to make them understand somehow that this needs to get figured out. Real quick. Not six months from now.”

Tuesday, Boeheim was echoed by Jim Calhoun, the retired University of Connecticut head coach who won three national championships and still lives in Storrs, just 70 miles from the Newtown school where the massacre took place:

“I don’t think there’s any politics about gun control,” the former UConn coach said. “In my opinion, nobody should have an automatic weapon unless they’re…protecting the country. The idea that children would be faced with that, or teachers that were trying to help them…there are other things in my lifetime that I can explain — a distraught kid, a fired employee. But this is so nonsensical.

We’re not asking to take away people’s rights. The right to bear arms was put in there for tyranny, the fact that the government could come back and abuse us…As a former American history teacher, I can tell you it wasn’t put in for us to shoot each other.”

Boeheim and Calhoun have always been known as frank, outspoken coaches, but they’ve been joined by coaches who don’t all come with that brand. Villanova’s Jay Wright spoke out against assault weapons on Twitter, and Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey delivered a heartfelt post-game speech after his team’s loss to Ohio State on Tuesday, saying now was “a time for change,” though he wasn’t sure if it was a “gun issue,” a “mental illness issue,” or something else.

But the prevalence of assault weapons shouldn’t be the only focus of coaches in college basketball and football. Not given the deep-seeded relationship between guns and athletes. “The sports world is filled with athletes at every level of competition who have been wounded, killed, lost loved ones, or otherwise been victimized by guns – or who have had their lives changed forever by turning to guns themselves,” the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence wrote in a report on guns in sports. “Entire rosters could be filled with star players who have been adversely affected by guns in some way.”

If coaches want to be real “agents of change,” as Kelsey said he would be, they won’t just speak out against gun violence when it is in the news or when the cameras are on them (though they are of course welcome to). They should also embrace their role as educators and role models for the 18- to 22-year-old young men they coach every day, and educate them of the dangers firearms pose not just to themselves but to their families and friends, and push them to avoid the trappings of the gun culture that is so prevalent in sports at the collegiate and especially the professional level, where many of their players hope to be one day. And perhaps they can take a page from Charlie Strong, the University of Louisville football coach who has not spoken out about the Newtown tragedy but has a “NO GUNS” policy for members of his team and preaches the policy as a core value of his program.

It’s great that coaches want to speak out on important issues. Here’s hoping they also take action on those issues in the areas where they can.

The bridge is yours.

-Game of Thrones will have longer episodes in its third season.

-Mind, blown (also, now I feel old): Homeland‘s Mike is in Mean Girls.

-I wish Jason Schwartzman was going to play his Moonrise Kingdom character on Parks and Recreation, but I’ll take him as a video rental store owner, too.

-The case for parents playing video games with their children.

-Homeland needs to replace its only female writer.

This morning, Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced legislation in the Senate “to arrange for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games and violent programming on children.” It’s depressing to see lawmakers rushing after diversions in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when the conversations we ought to be having should be about gun control and mental health treatment, among other structural factors. And it’s even worse when you consider that Rockefeller’s wholly redundant bill has hit the floor of Congress before any gun legislation was introduced.

Part of what makes Rockefeller’s request that the National Academy study video game violence so frustrating to watch is that the Academy’s done just this before. The 1999 Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children Protection Act included a provision that had the Secretary of Education contract the Academy to study the origins of school violence, including “the impact of cultural influences and exposure to the media, video games, and the Internet.” Katherine Newman, the Johns Hopkins professor who lead up that team, wrote in Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, her later book on the subject, that “Millions of young people play video games full of fistfights, blazing guns, and body slams. Bodies litter the floor in many of our most popular films. Yet only a minuscule fraction of the consumers become violent. Hence, if there is an effect, children are not all equally susceptible to it.” In other words, finding out why a very small number of consumers are overly influenced by popular culture may be more useful than trying to measure the uneven and diffuse influence of movies, television shows, and games.

And that isn’t the only work the National Academy has done on video games and other media. The National Academies Press has published Deadly Lessons, a study of school shootings, that is non-committal on the question of whether there is a causal link between consuming violent media and violent behavior. Academics have presented literature reviews of the work on media’s influence on children and young adults to the National Academies of Science National Research Council Board on Children, Youth and Families. This is not a question the National Academy needs prodding from Sen. Rockefeller to consider, or that’s been ignored by other research organizations.

But it is a question the National Rifle Association and other gun control opponents would love to see energy diverted to. In a Fox News story about the NRA’s much-delayed press conference that suggested the lobby would seek to shift the debate to culture rather than to weapons bans, an anonymous source was quoted as saying: “If we’re going to talk about the Second Amendment, then let’s also talk about the First Amendment, and Hollywood, and the video games that teach young kids how to shoot heads.” That’s different from the kind of measured research that might debunk a causal link between entertainment and shootings. But it demonstrates how easily this sort of conversation can be employed as camouflage.

I have no objection to the idea that we should take the time to consider issues carefully and to introduce closely tailored legislation that will best address our policy needs. And at least Rockefeller’s bill calls for a study, rather than, say, banning first-person shooter games outright. But if the lawmakers who represent us are going to rush to respond to urgent social problems to score political credit, it would be nice if they prioritized substance instead of distractions.

I’m always up for modernizing Nielsen ratings, but this new measurement the organization is rolling out isn’t exactly what I was looking for:

Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will measure the total audience for social TV activity, including participants and users who are exposed to the activity. According to Nielsen, this will provide the “precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.”

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen, said in a statement. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”

According to Nielsen, the Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings. The tool is described as “giving TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity.”

I get that networks want to see what kind of buzz their shows are generating. But it’s a measure of real-time engagement, which is the same measurement that’s been rendered so much less useful by the rise of DVRs and high-quality, legal streaming sites. And as anyone who has been dismayed by the gap between, say, the volume of Twitter conversation about a cult sitcom like Community and the actual ratings for that show, I think it would ultimately be much more useful to the survival of beloved but low-rated programs to measure the real viewership of those programs more comprehensively. To incorporate more data, Nielsen would have to trust self-reporting from legal streaming services like Hulu, and would have to work out windows for those reports to be delivered and combined with DVR data. But it would be much more useful for networks, and for those of us who love shows where we fear enthusiasm for them isn’t being captured by the current ratings system, especially those like the CW with younger audiences who are watching more television streaming and on mobile devices, to be able to sell package ad deals across platforms, than to know what people talk about Twitter on any given night.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I like Big Boi and Kelly Rowland’s “Mama Told Me” so much, other than the fact that it’s an utterly irresistible, summery jam that came out just as winter’s descending:

I think it’s mostly that it reminds me of a piece I’d like to see a hip-hop historian write, about the shift from sampling, which renders the sampled voice, be it male or female, passive, to the much more prevalent practice now of having female artists record original hooks and choruses for hip-hop songs that renders so many of them effective duets.

This is, of course, not, a new phenomenon. Jewell, in an oral history of The Chronic published last month in honor of the album’s twentieth anniversary reflected on her role in bringing women’s voices into hip-hop songs, saying ” It all worked. My singin’ over their hard rap lyrics; rap had never accepted that before. I put my soft, sultry R&B singing on their records. Now every rapper has to have a female on their songs.” My regular Twitter interlocutor Soul Honky, to whom I am much indebted suggested an earlier structural explanation: that the popularity of “It Takes Two,” which heavily sampled singer Lyn Collins, prompted a crackdown on sampling that made it legally and financially more expedient to have a female singer record original vocals for a track.

Whatever the origin is, there’s something fascinating about the fact that hip-hop, a genre that gets slammed for the misogyny of its lyrics by legitimate commentators and concern trolls alike, with hugely varying degrees of fairness, is also probably the kind of music that puts men and women in musical conversation within the same song with the greatest frequency. Part of what’s fun about “Mama Told Me” is listening to Rowland’s voice spill out from the limitations of the Solange-level-sunny chorus to take over the song in its second half. Part of what’s fun about listening to Estelle’s “American Boy” is to hear Kanye West, or at least the character he’s playing, flirt with Estelle based on the characteristics she’s laid out for what she’s looking for in a man. As a feminist, one of the reasons I love hip-hop so much is that it’s fun to hear men and women talking to each other instead of past each other, the way they so often seem to be doing in traditional pop and rock.