The best of 2016: movies, TV, music, and books

Netflix released Last Chance U just two weeks after its 2016 summer breakaway hit, Stranger Things. Unsurprisingly, the documentary series was overshadowed by its near-simultaneous release with the Winona Ryder-led hit, and it also was competing with not just one, but a lot of other great summer shows. But removed from that summer glut, Last Chance U stands tall as one of Netflix’s best original series of the last few years, and with the second season debuting this week, the time has come to give it a closer look.

The six-episode first season of Last Chance U follows the 2015 football season of East Mississippi Community College (a.k.a. “Scooba Tech”); season two will focus on the same team, but with some new characters entering the mix (and some old ones leaving) this time around. Students join the program at Scooba as a last shot at a Division I football scholarship, and many of them balance on the line between passing and dropping out of school. The show is packed with heart-wrenching characters, and captures a part of the country rarely seen on TV. In that way, and many others, it’s reminiscent of another football show that was once overlooked, but over time grew to be a beloved series: Friday Night Lights.

In 2016, anyone who complained that movies were bad just wasn’t trying. The year was full of stunners in all categories: tear-jerking comedies, joyous musicals, moving dramas, haunting fables, and everything in between. It was a year full of surprises from first-time directors to veterans.

Here are 21 of the best, ranked, with 10 honorable mentions at the end.

Early in “The Jacket,” the first-season finale of FX’s terrific new comedy Atlanta, protagonist Earn (Donald Glover) leaves the apartment he unexpectedly woke up in after a wild time the night before.

As he strolls down the sidewalk, blinking blearily in the sun, he’s suddenly passed by several people in cow costumes. It’s free chicken sandwich day, one of them proclaims, but Earn seems as if he could not be less fazed by the sight of people in cow costumes interrupting his morning.

Game of Thrones’ most recent season found repellant villain Ramsay Bolton bloodied and strapped to a chair. He’d come within a breath of securing his grasp on the North in the season’s epic battle. Instead, thanks to a strategic decision made by Sansa Stark, who had briefly been his unwilling wife, he found himself unexpectedly defeated.

Sansa chose his punishment — feeding him to his own ravenous hounds. She watched as the dogs attacked the man who brutally raped and tortured her during their brief marriage. As she turned away, the faintest of smiles played across her lips.

We’ve somehow made it to the end of 2016 without spontaneously bursting into flame (at least literally speaking). Here at Vox Culture we’ve spent the past several days discussing the year’s best TV shows, TV episodes, movies, novels, new comic books, older comic books, performances, underrated albums, and more — and now we’re summing up 2016 another way, with five words that shed light on this chaotic, confusing, always-eventful year.

At a September 9 fundraiser, Hillary Clinton coined a phrase to describe a portion of Donald Trump’s supporters: “basket of deplorables.” She said:

2016 was a strange year for Hollywood on the box office front. As expected, Walt Disney Studios dominated and Warner Bros. made a comeback, but there were few breakout surprises, let alone new franchises to truly embrace, outside of Deadpool and Bad Moms. (No, true believers, Doctor Strange doesn’t count. Everyone knew it was going to be a hit.) And while movies that were expected to bomb, such as Warcraft and The Legend of Tarzan, did exactly that, they also sort of didn’t, thanks to the wonders of studio accounting and international sales.

Keeping all that in mind, here’s a snapshot of some of the winners and losers at the box office over the past 12 months. (As a reminder, these opinions are informed by global box office, which is key for a movie to actually earn a profit.)

“Entertainment” is a vast term comprising many forms of media, countless genres, and infinite levels of quality. But no piece of entertainment exists independent of performers — the central figures who give presence, life, and meaning to the various diversions in which we choose to lose ourselves.

This year’s entertainment offerings were as wide-ranging as ever, and its central performances equally so: From world-famous pop singers to unknown child actors to dominant athletes, 2016’s best performers were those unique figures operating at the top of their respective games and elevating those games with their mere presence. In the ongoing search for meaning and goodness during a tumultuous and confusing year, these entertainers (presented here alphabetically and unranked) were our leading lights.

Comic books, more than ever, aren’t just about superheroes.

In 2016, comic writers, artists, and editors once again proved that there’s life beyond Marvel and DC Comics, beyond our favorite caped crusaders and mighty mutants. We will always have (and love) gigantic blockbusters featuring the Avengers, Batman, and Superman, but the number of great comic books in different genres has been growing steadily for the past few years.

There’s no one way to be a family — but you might not know it from watching television.

TV families tend to be cut from the same cliché cloth: An uptight mom reminding the lazy dad that he needs to pick up his socks for once. Kids whose character descriptions span some combination of too-cool teen (see: Black-ish’s Zoey), lovably dopey goofball (see: Bob’s Burgers’ Gene), or neurotic nerd (see: The Middle’s Sue), with a close cousin of precocious and/or terrifying star student (see: Modern Family’s Alex). Maybe there’s a kooky grandparent waiting in the wings to dish out sass or surprisingly helpful advice, depending on the week (see: Fresh Off the Boat’s Grandma).

One of the best reasons to love television is that its bounty comes in quantities both large and small.

Great television can take the form of a series hundreds of hours long or a single episode of just 22 minutes (or even less). We’ve already covered the best TV shows of 2016, and now it’s time to turn our gaze toward the year’s best episodes.

For most of my life, TV felt like a small city where you knew everybody’s name. Even in the early 2000s, you might see an actor pop up on late-night TV or a magazine cover, and even if you didn’t watch their show, you’d say, “Oh, yeah, that’s the guy from that show.” You didn’t know everybody intimately, but you still knew who they were.

That started to change in the late 2000s, and as of 2016, TV is in full urban sprawl mode. It’s a cliché now to say there’s so much TV that no one critic can watch all of it, but it’s true. Vox employs two full-time TV writers — myself and Caroline Framke — and lots of our other writers watch lots of TV, and we still can’t keep tabs on everything.

2016 was another robust year for comic books.

Marvel’s long-delayed Secret Wars saga finally ended, only to be replaced by a second Civil War and a Captain America twist no one saw coming. Meanwhile, DC Comics also launched a reboot event, Rebirth, and many smaller publishers continued to prove that some of the very best comic books — The Wicked + The Divine, Faith, Saga, Lumberjanes — don’t come from the big two.

If 2016 was good for anything, it was music. Yes, we lost a few truly brilliant minds in David Bowie, Prince, Sharon Jones, and Leonard Cohen. But on the whole, music thrived in 2016. Massive pop stars dropped albums overnight, albums that had eluded us for half a decade suddenly appeared, and captivating new names rose from nothing. To pick a top 15 songs in a year like this feels almost dismissive, cruel even.

So instead of picking the absolute best songs — those that stretched the boundaries of the medium or genre — we’re redefining “best” to mean songs that made this year, in its deepest and darkest moments, feel a little bit less like a raging garbage fire.

2016 will go down in history as a year that changed America’s political landscape forever. And it gave us books that grapple with that changing landscape, fiercely and provocatively; books that delve deeply into the American identity and change the way we see it.

But it also gave us books that allow us to momentarily escape from the disappointments of our world, to transcend the limitations of reality and experience life through other eyes.

Television boasts a unique quality that few other forms of media can claim: Its recurring format allows it to regularly come into your home, to become part of your everyday routines. You can follow its stories and characters for weeks, months, years.

But sometimes TV is less about the journey and more about those special moments that jog you awake, make you laugh, make you ache, make you think. Those instances that compel you to revisit a certain scene or episode over and over again — because of a sidesplitting line delivery, because you want to relive its incredible dramatic tension, because it’s just that good.

The TV performance of the year belonged to Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood. She was closely followed, for my money, by Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Amazon’s Fleabag.

At first, the two would not seem to have that much in common; they’re not even playing members of the same species. Wood plays Dolores, a robot who’s slowly discovering she’s trapped in hell — which takes the form of a theme park meant to entertain rich humans — on a sci-fi show that sometimes (often) bites off more than it can chew.

The trickiest question movie awards–giving groups face this December is posed by a character named Chiron.

He’s the main character in Barry Jenkins’s universally heralded movie Moonlight, the story of a young black man coming to terms with not just his sexuality but also his identity, against the backdrop of Miami.

When The Sopranos debuted on HBO in 1999, its impact was seismic. Other TV networks immediately started trying to copy it. The show’s offbeat storytelling rhythms and antiheroic main character spread across the vast televisual landscape. And it won award after award after award.

Except … that’s not really true. It was eventually true, but it took a few years — and in some cases, the bulk of The Sopranos’ run — to play out. There was a lot of fumbling around, a lot of trial and error, and many false starts before the Sopranos model took root and helped birth the so-called “golden age of television.” And it also wasn’t as if The Sopranos arrived out of nowhere; it was hugely indebted to TV shows that preceded it, most notably its fellow ‘90s babies Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Oz.