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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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.

I caught up with this third season Treme last week, and among other things that struck me about the show—particularly that television shows about music are always going to be viscerally satisfying in a way that even the most beautifully-shot shows about food can never be—that the show really clicked for me this season, and distinguished itself from David Simon’s other shows, through its female characters. I wrote about two of them, LaDonna and Janette, as part of a piece on television’s difficult women for the Daily Beast late last week:

I was initially frustrated by Janette Desautel’s reaction to the opportunity to open a large, well-backed restaurant back in New Orleans. Her disregard for human-resources briefings and her distaste for even the prospect of profit margins seemed petulant to me early in the season. But as the restaurant opened, her temper tantrums started to make sense as the reasonable-sounding restrictions began to make it harder for Janette to run her kitchen, manage her staff in a way that was effective, turn out dishes that became so in demand that it was impossible to fulfill all the orders and still keep quality high, or even hold a benefit for a fellow, if less-glamorous, New Orleans restaurateur.

The experiences of that woman, LaDonna Batiste-Williams, raise the question of what it even means to be strong when the world punishes you for being cool and composed. After surviving a brutal sexual assault and struggling to reopen her family bar in the aftermath of Katrina, LaDonna spent much of this season waiting for her assailant’s trial to begin and trying to push back against demands of protection money. Her rudeness to her husband’s upper-crust relatives or willingness to cuss out the man extorting her may not be badass, but they’re an assertion of dignity to people who are all too willing to peel it off her like a layer of skin. And while LaDonna may never get the baseball bat she keeps behind the bar out in time to chase off the man trying to intimidate her into withdrawing her rape charges, or to keep him from burning her bar, her failures don’t make her weak or flailing.

I also thought Treme did an excellent job this season with two of its much more subtle storylines this year, too: Annie (Lucia Micarelli), a young musician beginning her rise towards the big time, and Sofia (India Ennenga), the daughter of civil rights lawyer Toni Bernette. Annie’s trajectory is outwardly smooth: she signs with an agent who keeps his promises to her, she begins touring and her work is well-received, her album comes out towards the end of the season. What lends the story drama is how her success is received by the people around her. Her mother (Isabella Rosselini), devalues Annie’s success because she isn’t performing classical music, and makes little effort to learn more about the blues tradition Annie’s working in, even as her father makes some efforts. And even worse, her boyfriend Davis, a DJ, is pursuing his career in parallel to Annie’s, and is so distracted by his own dreams that he doesn’t even notice that Annie’s success is happening. Davis is more musically and politically ambitious than Annie is—while she aspires to record some of her old friend Harley’s songs, he’s trying to convince his aunt to fund a scathing opera about Katrina and New Orleans’ musical legacy. But when he finds success, it’s with the musical equivalent of a temper tantrum that goes viral, cussing out his aunt, and Annie, or so it seems, in the process. The two of them break up without a big, bruising fight: neither of them needs to speak out loud the obvious truth that Davis will always be jealous, and Annie’s simply grown beyond his parochialism. By the end of the season, Annie’s performing at Jazz Fest, and Davis watches her, invisible, from the crowd: he finally sees her and her successes, but her world is now too large for him to stand out in it.

Sofia’s story is somewhat more dramatic, but it’s still handled as if the human scale of it is important and worthy. In retaliation for her mother’s investigations into the New Orleans Police Department’s actions during the storm, Sofia becomes the regular subject of traffic stops, warnings from cops, even an arrest for being underage at a party where alcohol is being served. Sofia is doing her best to be a good kid, and to protect both her family and her mother’s work by not getting into trouble—Toni’s surprise when she finds out that Sofia has broken up with an older boyfriend she thought was a bad influence on her daughter is a lovely example of a mother coming face-to-face with her daughter’s maturity and being pleasantly surprised by what she finds there. But it’s New Orleans, and Sofia is a teenager. Some joy and some trouble are inevitable. And when Toni decides to send Sofia off to finish her senior year in Florida, it’s both the right thing and painfully unfair. When Sofia comes home for a visit and finds Terry Colson, an NOPD officer who becomes her mother’s new boyfriend, drinking juice in his boxers, the polarization between them is reversed. Their conversation may consist of Sofia telling Terry that Florida sucks. But from Sofia’s face, she’s unexpectedly pleased that her mother’s found love, or something like it, in the wake of her father’s suicide. Both of them are growing, and for the first time, capable of recognizing it in each other and being happy for each other, as if they are friends as well as mother and daughter.
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Ta-Nehisi is reading Raymond Chandler, and in exploring Philip Marlowe’s distaste for some of the women in his path, his observation that “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible,” turns to the question of visibile manifestation of male desire, and its relationship to shame:

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Masculinity’s central tenet is control—and perhaps most importantly, control of the body. Nothing contradicts that edict like erections. It unmans you, it compels you through sensations you scarcely understand. And it threatens to expose you, to humiliates you, in front of everyone. Laugh now at the boy at the middle school dance, who gets an erection on the slow number (God help him if he has orgasm.) But he does not forget that laughter, nor does he forget what prompted it. That boy is going to be a rapper. Or a painter. Or an author of fictions where men are men and somehow are invulnerable to the humiliating effects of the female form.

In the comments to that post, a number of people, rightly, bring up Prince as an example of someone who managed to decouple desire and shame, which I think is exactly right. When he sings in “When Doves Cry,” “Touch if you will my stomach / Feel how it trembles inside / You’ve got the butterflies all tied up / Don’t make me chase you / Even doves have pride,” Prince is offering up evidence of his arousal and embracing the power dynamic his desire occasions. The woman he’s speaking to has the initiative there. There is the possibility that he will be rejected or shamed. But he’s also gained power by being willing to run those risks, to speak honestly to her.

It’s also worth, as a counterpoint to Marlowe’s contempt, to consider Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks:

Her appearance in his bed is a repetition of Carmen Sternwood’s attempts to seduce Marlowe. But rather than reacting with disgust to his own attraction to her, or anger at her for arousing him, Cooper is kind, and self-denying. “What I want and what I need are two different things,” he tells her. His desire for her can exist within a web of his other values, including his devotion to the F.B.I. And perhaps most importantly, Cooper isn’t angry at Audrey for wanting him, an emotion that seems to underscore Marlowe’s repulsion to a number of the women that he encounters.

Because that’s the critical other half of this conversation, one that I discussed in part yesterday in exploring why James Bond and other sex objects designed for women’s consumption can be so threatening. If men can be shamed for visible and involuntary evidence of arousal, both because they’re deemed to have slipped in their control, and because they risk sexual rejection from the women who have prompted their reaction, women can be shamed for voluntarily expressing arousal and asking that their sexual needs be met. Such requests meet with such complicated reactions because they fracture sex, raising the possibility that for men and women, intercourse assumes varying levels of importance and delivers different levels of satisfaction. In other words, a positive reaction to evidence of male desire is the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of it. And that negotiation is a culturally fraught one.
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If you want to know what it looks like when male artists show solidarity with women and women’s issues, the Dublin hip-hop group Original Rudeboys just provided a great example of it, turning down a chance to open for Chris Brown:

A member of the group Sean Walsh said: ‘Even though it’s a huge opportunity to play in the O2 with a major hip hop star and a substantial fee was offered, we are completely against Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna.’

The group also claimed they didn’t want to mislead their own fans as their latest single ‘Blue Eyes’ is about domestic violence.

Sean said: ‘In addition, with our latest single ‘Blue Eyes’ being about domestic violence it goes against everything we are about as a band and supporting Chris would send out the wrong message to our fans.’

It’s one thing to talk the talk, and another to take an actual financial and long-term growth hit in order to stay consistent with what you believe—or, like John Scalzi, to spend actual time and energy arguing the good fight instead of simply saying the right thing when you’re asked and it’s convenient to do so. I hope this comes back for them in all the best ways. And while it’s a little hard to track down good streaming audio of their stuff, I’d be up for hearing more of this:

On a related note, the argument’s been made, I think effectively, that some of the reaction to Chris Brown has been racialized, making a black man a scapegoat for domestic violence while famous white men with even worse records get to continue on their way. I do think that there’s an extent to which Brown appears to be trolling people who are dismayed by his behavior, since disapprobation seems to have hardened support among his core fans, as is the case with his decision to dress up as a jihadi stereotype for Halloween.

But I do think that there are racial differences between the response to Brown and the response to white men of a certain profitability behaving badly. And I can’t think of a better example of that than how quickly a silence descended around FX’s decision to work with Charlie Sheen, and to stay in business with him after the first ten episodes of Anger Management, and the fact that when the news came down yesterday that Fox had struck a deal to syndicate the sitcom on nine affiliate stations, that it went relatively uncommented upon. I’d like to think that the news that more Fox divisions are getting into business with a guy with a long record of violence against women is news. And if equality is what we’re after, I’d like to see the same kind of pressure on Sheen to behave constructively and respectfully towards women if he wants public approbation that’s being applied to Brown.

Well, this is one music industry biopic I’m actually excited to see, and that has some chance of not disgracing or white-washing the person being portrayed: Benedict Cumberbatch is set to play Brian Epstein. Per The Hollywood Reporter:

Todd Graff wrote the screenplay, whose focus is not a story about The Beatles from Epstein’s point of view but the story of Epstein himself. Sometimes called the “fifth Beatle,” Epstein signed the band in 1961 — before Beatlemania hit — and died in 1967 from an accidental drug overdose. He was a closet homosexual and suffered from gambling and drug addictions — and was many times the glue that held the band together. The producers describe the project as the story of “the man who threw the biggest party of the 1960s but ultimately forgot to invite himself.”

Further signs of optimism: Graff wrote and directed the excellent Camp. And Tom Hanks is going to produce through Playtone, a decision that produced the excellent and mysteriously underrated That Thing You Do.

That movie looked at an American band in the same era as the rise of the Beatles, and told its story through the perspective of the band’s drummer, a late addition to the group, rather than primarily through the perspective of their manager, played by Hanks. But it had a nice, deft sense of what it takes to wrangle young men who are just getting famous, and of the commercial structure that elevated promising bands in the era. Hopefully, this look at Epstein’s life will have those same nice grace notes, and get away from the Lennon-McCartney cliches, without wallowing too much in Tragic Gayness.

I’m here at the office a bit late, and was Googling around, and stumbled onto Johnny Mathis’s recording of Kol Nidre, which he recorded in 1958, and a glorious reminder of both the emotion behind what’s technically a contract and the complex history of black and Jewish collaborations in music:

And as someone who writes about art, it’s always nice to be reminded that the Awe in Days of Awe can come in many forms.

Well, this is discouraging. Lady Gaga’s label has apparently decided that, rather than ordering costumes for the singer’s tour that suit her body, or letting her decide what she looks good and comfortable in, the pop singer needs to lose weight:

Executives at Universal Music Group saw recent pictures of the singer bulging out of her too-tight clothes and were forced to order a better-fitting wardrobe for the remainder her of her world tour, according to a RadarOnline report. “The tight, skimpy outfits weren’t doing anything for Gaga’s new fuller figure, so Universal ordered more flattering and better fitting costumes for the rest of the tour,” a source told the gossip site.

They allegedly told the “Born This Way” singer to lay off her favorite high-calorie foods, pizza and pasta. “Gaga has an incredible appetite for Italian food, which stems largely from her roots. It’s very easy on tour to get hooked on a diet of pizza and pasta because they are comfort foods—and when you are away from home you always long for something that reminds you of where you came from,” the source said. “She loves to eat, but because of her tiny frame it shows if she doesn’t work out as much as normal. Executives told her to quit gorging on her favorite foods.”

Did they like her better when Gaga was talking about being on the so-called Drunk Diet promoted by her then-boyfriend Luc Carl? Are some of the stranger things she’s worn during her time in the public eye actually less attractive than the sight of her with curves? There’s something pretty depressing about an environment where it’s easier for a woman to get away with wearing a dress made of raw meat than a body mass index that’s outside what the corporate definition of acceptable.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been watching the back-and-forth between singer and performer Amanda Palmer and musician Steve Albini. The origin of the feud is this: Palmer used a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1.2 million to fund the recording of her new album. She then asked musicians to volunteer to play with her band on her tour, but didn’t guarantee compensation to any of the volunteers, though as she is paying some musicians at some stops on the tour, but not others. Albini criticized her request on the grounds that she could have found a way to pay musicians if she wanted to. “The reason I don’t appeal to other people in this manner is that all those things can easily pay for themselves, and I value self-sufficiency and independence, even (or especially) from an audience,” he wrote.

The thing is, I do kind of agree with Palmer that, as she puts it “YOU HAVE TO LET ARTISTS MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS ABOUT HOW THEY SHARE THEIR TALENT AND TIME.” And for the purposes of this experiment, let’s accept her argument that the funds for recording, designing, and distributing the album aren’t available to pay for touring, and Albini shouldn’t have linked the two. But Palmer is, after all, selling tickets for the tour, and in some cities, those tickets are reselling on sites like StubHub for figures considerably above face value. I understand if she doesn’t have $35,000 or whatever else it would have cost to pay the musicians she’s asked to volunteer on the tour right now. I’m not sure I understand why she couldn’t have adjusted the ticket prices, or her own take on the tour, to make sure she’d have the revenue to pay people who played with her.

And there’s a difference between between people volunteering their time without it being requested of them, or people creating their own opportunities to play even if it means playing for free or for donations, and someone who has money, or the clear power to raise money, asking people to perform for free. Palmer has the right to ask people to play for free, just as people have the right to busk or volunteer their time. But I think it’s rather ambitious of her to expect that people see her as praiseworthy for it, no matter how highly she thinks of herself and what it means to play with her in concert. If you started out playing for free and found models that worked for you, why wouldn’t it be more genuinely admirable to create a more viable and supportive atmosphere for the people coming up after you?