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Intro

Once again we come to year end and it’s time to look back. It’s been a strange year. The impact of last year’s strikes lasted through to what movies and TV had to offer, and the world at large felt as though finding joy and hope was scarce on the ground. (November in particular for some reason cough).

But it was still a year of some pretty good highs amongst the lows. And, as we did last year, we’re going to focus on and celebrate the good. So let’s get into it with some of the best that 2024 had to offer.

Movies, Shows, Books, and People Who Made 2024 Better

Wicked the Movie

I know, I know. Either you’re sick of hearing about this or you’re still working on getting the steps of the book dance down.

However, if we’re talking about highlights of the year it’d be impossible to leave Wicked off of the list. It surpassed all box office expectations and showed that it’s not that audiences hate movie musicals, it’s that they hate musicals done badly.

I’ve been a fan of Jon M Chu and his team for years so I’m not even going to pretend I’m not geeking out about how wonderful it is that the rest of the world is finally learning how amazing musicals can be in their hands. Christopher Scott and his team on choreography showing that dance can be everything from big and bombastic to small and heartbreaking and still be grounded in character and advance the story. Alice Brooks behind the camera making sure to show you what’s happening with framing that uses the medium of movies but doesn’t erase the point that in a musical what you should see is the performers.

Myron Kerstein giving yet another master class in how to edit a musical that respects and honors the music and dancing. Paul Tazewell making a phalanx's worth of costumes all of which have their own symbolism and color story and remember that if one of your main characters is green then anything green in someone’s clothes is going to symbolize them and NO I’m not over that, thank you for asking.

Anyway, I could go on but at a certain point I’m just listing everyone in Wicked’s IMDB page. With good reason. Whether or not you’re a fan of Wicked itself (let’s be real, act two of the Broadway show isn’t exactly known for being the strongest) you can’t deny that this was a movie put together by everyone on set doing s-tier work the whole way through. And it can’t be understated how we’re hearing awards season buzz for a movie with a Black female lead and an Asian director, two things that Hollywood tends to ignore when it comes time to hand statues around. You gotta tip your hat to Wicked for managing all that.

Bonus tip: If you like Wicked, go back and watch In the Heights to see what Jon M Chu and his people did there. When you see a number like 96,000 you understand how the next logical step is Jon saying no, we’re building multiple hamster wheels for a single number staring a member of the supporting cast because what do you mean “dream small?”

(Sorry, Jon - tornado wheel. Totally a tornado wheel. Ahem.)

Agatha All Along

One of my biggest regrets was real life problems (September through November was rough, y’all) made it impossible for me to do weekly writeups on Agatha All Along. But if the fact that I crawled my way out of an almost literal real life hole to do a writeup just on the costumes doesn’t show how good this show was I’m not sure what else will.

I’m using the words master class a lot but damn if Jac Shaeffer doesn’t deliver exactly that as a showrunner who knows that even in big name franchises like the MCU if character isn’t your first priority what in the hell are you even doing?

And, much like with Wicked, Agatha All Along doesn’t work unless everyone is bringing their… okay what is it with S-tier? Not A-Game but S-Game? Other? Look, they’ve got to be really freaking good, okay?

John Collins on production design, Daniel Selon on costuming - again just hit everyone on the IMDB list because it’s going to be true. You can’t do a series like this, which bends genre and narrative, without everyone doing the best they can at what they do. It’s not possible.

The other thing I want to stress is that Agatha All Along managed to turn in something of such incredible high quality on the tiniest budget ever for an MCU show. That doesn’t just require skill, that requires wisdom. The list here could be endless but suffice it to say it includes things like how the conceit of the Witches’ Road was revealed to be that it’s supposed to look like the clearance rack at Michael’s. Choices like that had me clapping like a seal I was so delighted by them.

The story of the show was so wonderfully self-contained I don’t know that we need another season. But wherever Jac Shaeffer ends up next is definitely going to be something to watch.

AMC’s Interview With the Vampire Season Two

This one I did get to talk about as it came out so you can head over to those articles if you want my detailed thoughts. But it’s still worth shouting out that AMC’s Interview With the Vampire took the foundation of its first season and built on it beautifully. Taking what for the novels is a throwaway concept of “Eh, maybe Louis didn’t remember right. Happens to the best of us.” and transforming that into a multi-layered narrative where not a single narrator can be trusted - but maybe you in the audience can figure it out if you pay attention - is beautiful.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention yet again that the one thing the show fails on hardcore is issues of race and prejudice. I give heavy side eye to anybody who praises season two unreservedly without mentioning that it included things like expecting the audience to feel empathy and even admiration for a Nazi sympathizer with a thing for underage girls. Hell, there could be entire doctorates written on the contrast of the Interview With the Vampire showrunners insisting they wanted to see people wearing “Claudia is my coven” t-shirts at cons versus the natural way the audience of Agatha All Along immediately resonated with “She is my scar.” (hint: It’s own voices behind the camera that make the difference! Also the lack of Nazis!)

Still, among the good parts of season two is that the narrative is now finally moving past the problematic historic periods that the showrunners have had two seasons now to prove they can’t handle. Instead we’re heading directly into the story of Lestat de Lioncourt, the drama queen of the damned himself. If season three stops pretending to care about real historic events and simply focuses on Lestat’s highs, lows, and love life, we’re going to be on solid ground indeed.

X-Men ‘97

The extremely heavily nostalgia flavored marketing for this show almost made me not watch it. It seemed like it was being pitched as “Hey, remember this??” the series.

However, once I watched I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was no such thing. Instead it was a labor of love by those who, yes, did remember the original X-Men cartoon but only to use it as a jumping off point.

Much like Into the Spider-Verse, X-Men ‘97 takes the idea of known properties and uses them to tell stories with bigger meaning. They don’t have to explain to you who the X-Men are so they can instead focus more time and energy on the things the X-Men can represent. And yes, it was a sad thing to see new fans emerging who had no idea that no, the concepts of racism, symbolic homophobia, and even prejudiced assholes wearing ugly trucker hats weren’t new by a long shot.

That being said, some newer ideas do get folded in naturally. At the time of the original the idea of someone being non-binary wasn’t common, but the shapeshifting character of Morph can now by identified as such by other X-Men referring to Morph as “they.”

The show had some intense behind the scenes problems which, since this is a highlight article, I’m not going to get into. But the plus side is the show itself was strong and worth watching whether you’re an old school X-Men fan or you’ve never heard of them before. We’ve got seasons two and three on the horizon so here’s hoping they meet or even beat the quality.

Have I Got News For You (US Version)

Normally the phrase “based on the British show of the same name” is something to be wary about. But in this case it turns out the franchise is in good hands.

Hosted by Roy Wood Jr (aka “Should’ve gotten The Daily Show hosting gig but here we are”), with Amber Ruffin (aka "a human delight and one of the many reasons you should be watching Late Night With Seth Meyers if you’re not already"), and Michael Ian Black (aka "he of many, many pop culture commentary gigs"), Have I Got News For You sums up the latest weekly news with trivia questions, jokes, and other amusements.

Each week two guests join Amber and Michael on their teams as they try to “win” (like many British panel shows, the points don’t really matter). Typically one is a politician and one is an entertainer. The guests can be more interesting than you’d expect - Anthony Scaramucci was a particular standout both for his knowledgeable comments and for his seemingly sincere mea culpa when challenged by Michael for his time with the Trump administration.

Though sometimes the guests are the weak point. One comedian rambled on for so long and so unconnectedly to anything anyone else said that by the end of the episode it felt as though a great deal had mercifully had been left on the cutting room floor (and that the place to be was wherever Roy, Amber, and Michael were meeting up for drinks and dish after taping.)

Some segments work better than others, but as the show was taped weekly and aired soon after taping, you could tell they were seeing what did and didn’t land and were adjusting accordingly. Bits that dragged on at the start of the season were no longer done by the end of it. And even with the weaker bits, the segments come quickly enough that you didn’t have to wait long for a better segment to happen.

Plus some of the humor is so good even the weakest moment makes it worthwhile. In the first episode alone there was a moment where I laughed so hard I scared my pets.

The show is currently on hiatus as season one is over, but it will be back in February. I’m looking forward to it.

Moon Knight by Jed MacKay, Alessandro Cappuccio, and Rachelle Rosenberg (and others)

This one is a bit of a cheat because it didn’t start this year but rather ended this year… while also starting again this year.

Look, it’s comics. They do that.

But on the bright side, this means it’s the perfect time to read the first Moon Knight series under Jed MacKay’s run, which started back in 2021.

I saw someone online - my apologies for not catching their name, it was a fan on a subreddit - say words to the effect that the thing about Moon Knight that’s so great is that everyone who takes on the title gets to make it their own. There’s so much to play with!

Which I loved because that is a super positive and diplomatic way of saying Moony’s canon is a hot fucking mess even for comics.

Unlike, say, Tony Stark (genius inventor of weapons who ends up in a cave with a box of scraps) or Steve Rogers (WWII, punches Hilter, super soldier serum, frozen in ice), Moon Knight has no solid core canon concepts attached to him other than, well, the name really. Does he have powers? Dissociative Identity Disorder? If he does have DID are the other people in his head named Steven Grant and Jake Lockley? How about that whole Egyptian God thing, real or nah?

And on and on. Which has given room for some writers and artists to do brilliant work with Moony and others to… not so much. Generally speaking even the most diehard of fans get a haunted look on their faces if you ask about the run that said Marc, the son of a rabbi, took all his inspiration from a Nazi. To say nothing of the Age of Khonshu. (No, really, ideally say nothing.)

How this relates to Jed MacKay is that it would have been easy for him to come in to the title and ignore everything that came before. Plenty of comics writers do on this and other titles. There’s no shame in it an it’s often wise.

Instead, Jed embraced all of it. Whether to make it a strong driver of the plot, like Khonshu’s imprisonment because of Age of Khonshu, or even a glimpse of Marc’s internal development as he confesses to not knowing how he could’ve gotten so out of control as to do things on some of the more questionable runs. Big or small, Jed used it all to set Marc on a path of figuring out who he is and what he wants to be - and yes, that includes his relationships with Jake and Steven.

On the way we get old characters, like Marc’s ex Tigra, and new, such as Hunter’s Moon in one of the most brilliant additions to the canon that I nearly threw the issue with the reveal across the room I was so pleased with how well it showed an understanding of just how Khonshu thinks.

(I didn’t because I read via Marvel Unlimited on my phone. But I was tempted.)

Along the way there’s also a Big Event because god forbid Marvel have a year without a Big Event. But the Big Event at the climax of Moony’s story is one with groundwork laid in throughout the series and which makes sense as the thing which connects the ending of the first series with the start of the newest one. It helped, of course, that the Big Event was headed up by Jed himself, thus lending it more overall continuity and coherence than most Marvel Big Events and yes I am still bitter about the comic run of Age of Ultron thanks for asking.

AHEM.

Of course you can’t talk comics without including the art and coloring. There’s various artists for special issues and tie-ins, but the main ones for the run are Alessandro Cappuccio and Rachelle Rosenberg respectively. Alessandro has a deft hand at bodies and framing, making the characters seem as muscular as they need to be for what they do without being so beefy you wonder how they can move. He also knows his angles, managing to convey a world where things loom and are off-kilter without leaving the reader too disoriented to follow the action. Rachelle Rosenberg, for her part, manages to know how to use color in a title where the main character sticks to black and white, making sure even more colorful characters like Tigra fit in without ruining the gothic ambiance that surrounds Moony. Plus you gotta love the new addition that Marc, when he’s in costume, glows. It just makes sense, dang it!

Anyway, it’s a well done series with good mysteries, action, found family deliciousness (I haven’t even mentioned Reese and Soldier and the Midnight Mission and… ), Marc’s unique way of solving challenges while at the same time being the worst cause of his own problems, and one of the best explanations for why Task Master will never fuck with Moony.

As I say, it’s all done now so you can grab the omnibus or dip your toes in with the first trade paperback, or read it all over at Marvel Unlimited if you want. Whatever floats your fancy. But it is worth trying, even if you normally wouldn’t be in to a comic about Moon Knight.

Greg Pak

The 2024 election seems to have been the thing to finally catapult a good chunk of people who for various reasons were still clinging to Twitter the heck off of it. Though I still think it’s too soon to say where, if anywhere, is going to be the place to be, at the moment of me writing this Bluesky is certainly getting a lot of growth and attention.

If you are on Bluesky, then, and looking for a good person to follow, I think you could do a heck of a lot worse than Greg Pak. He’s first known for his role in the comics industry. But over on Bluesky he’s emerged as a guy who knows how to build a darn good starter pack.

Whether you’re interested in grassroots political action, local journalists, AANHPI creators, or more, odds are good Greg’s got a starter pack that’s worth your time. He’s also great about keeping conversations going about small steps you can do to help with anxiety about the world at large (the #DidThisToday hastag is the one to follow for that) and how to keep in touch with your elected officials to make sure they know how you feel.

(And - okay, I’d feel weird talking about Bluesky and not at least giving a shout out to Joshua J Friedman too. He’s the unofficial mayor with loads of tips and tricks for how to get started and will often help you flag higher ups when you have issues. So if you’re following one person go with Greg, if you’re doing two add in Joshua. Then go from there. Heck, you can even follow me if you want, I’m not shy.)

Outro

And there we have it. I know there were other things this year that people adored, but I had to limit this to things I can personally comment on. So if I didn’t mention something it’s not necessarily an indicator of anything but my ability to sit and interact with whatever it was.

Honestly, I feel like the important thing is knowing that no matter how dark and scary things can get, there are still people out there who are doing their best at what they do and sharing that best with the rest of us. There’s plenty of bad in the world, but there’s really cool stuff too. Even this year was no exception.

Thanks for reading and keeping me company this year, see y’all in 2025!