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Standard caveats: I don't watch everything! I am behind on many things. That's just the way the world is. So if something you loved isn't here, it is not a rebuke.

And: These are cultural — mostly pop-cultural — things. These are not the best things in the world. Like yours, my actual list of wonderful things from the year, if I wrote it in a journal instead of for work, would be a list of people and moments spent with them, of days when it was unexpectedly sunny and of the times when things suddenly felt better. But whatever journey you're on at any given moment, you can always use more good things. So here we go.

is about Jeff Bauman, whose lower legs were amputated after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. A film like this — a biopic, an apparent hero story, a story involving disability, a story about the aftereffects of terrorism — has a hundred hackneyed traps to avoid falling into, and the trailer unfortunately suggested that it would tumble headfirst into every one. But Gyllenhaal imbues Jeff with an ordinary temperament and ordinary problems that are not solved, to say the least, by sudden public attention. He, along with Tatiana Maslany as Jeff's girlfriend and Miranda Richardson as Jeff's mother, under the direction of David Gordon Green, make a far more complicated film than I expected. It is about the effects of personal rather than national tragedies, and the ways families adapt, compromise by sometimes-grueling compromise.
2. Holly Hunter brings her steeliest self to the parts of 

in which she plays Beth, the mother of the seriously ill Emily — where she nearly beats up a heckler at a comedy club and faces off with doctors. But the performance brings out new things in Hunter, too. I'm particularly fond of a moment when Emily's estranged boyfriend comes to the hospital to visit and begins to explain who he is. She turns around and says, "We know who you are, Kumail." In that sentence, she says that she knows exactly how hurt Emily was by the breakup, that she blames Kumail for it, that she doesn't expect him to be there and doesn't think he should be, that she's not looking for a fight, that she lacks the energy for much of a conversation, and that she doesn't want him to tell her how sorry he is. But the words are "We know who you are, Kumail."
3. Timothée Chalamet in 

 saying he doesn't really believe in money. A better portrait of the high school privileged purely theoretical socialist you will not find. Bless you, Greta Gerwig.
4. The romantic-comedy-inflected 

episode "Hang The DJ." I can't say much yet — it will be out on Dec. 29 — but it is a new direction for the series and I adored it.
5. All of Netflix's reboot of Norman Lear's '70s sitcom 

delighted me, but all it took to get me excited about season two was to hear the Gloria Estefan 

is a gimme on a list like this: scary, brilliant, funny, packed with wonderful performances from Daniel Kaluuya and Betty Gabriel and Catherine Keener and (deep breath here and just keep going). But the keys ... the keys. The moment with the keys.
7. The most physical performance I saw in theater this year was from Tony winner Ben Platt, whose 

 contained truckloads of truth to me.

8. The season premiere of 

tried to do a lot with a half-hour episode: It's a musical, it's about Juneteenth and it brings the show back from a break. But for the most part, 

. Few network sitcoms have taken time to list just some of the many things built with slave labor, let alone set them to music.
9. Mike Birbiglia's special 

, made available on Netflix this year, is funny and big-hearted and physically creative; kind of a cross between a comedy special and a one-man show, and often quite touching.
10. Speaking of unconventional comedy specials: Hasan Minhaj's 

is great and funny, but also does a better job than almost anything I've seen of incorporating social media into a visual presentation without looking like one of those movies where computers display lines of text one letter at a time.
11. When your organization has a contest and you're helping spread the word about the winner, you can only hope your enthusiasm will be as genuine as mine was when 

Tank and the Bangas won the Tiny Desk Contest

performance as then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer

 was not any particular accuracy, but its commitment to a weird, unhinged anger specific not to Spicer but to "Spicey", as invented for comedy purposes. (And the moose-lambs.)

13. Paula Vogel's play 

ended its Broadway run in August, shortly after winning two Tony Awards (including one for director Rebecca Taichman). But its use of light and imagery, including an unconventional beginning and a breathtaking use of costuming as a symbol of history, will stay with me.
14. Difficult losses that happened in 2016 continued to echo in 2017, as when Carrie Fisher's last performance as Princess Leia reached us in 

. How fortunate, then, that while Leia may not have been able to complete her story as originally planned, she built upon her decades of history with her great love and with Luke, who first found her as a captured princess and came to know her as a fearless general.
15. Holiday episodes of episodic TV shows can easily become throwaways; not so the Emmy-winning "Thanksgiving" episode of 

, written by Aziz Ansari and his co-star Lena Waithe. Waithe's new show, 

, comes to Showtime in early January.

16. You may never have seen a movie as obsessed with architecture as the quiet and unassuming 

, in which John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson build a bond that exists both literally and figuratively in the shadows of the great modern buildings of Columbus, Ind.
17. Salma Hayek wrote a searing op-ed for the 

 But the best evidence this year of what she stood to lose as an actress, and what film stood to lose, was her subtle performance in 

, an uncomfortable, intelligent, strange 

.
18. Not everything about the action movie 

quite worked, but you know what worked perfectly?

 It is almost possible for a film to be so stunning to look at that its inconsistencies cease to matter.

19. Netflix series 

is strange and sad and funny and smart about high school, but at its center is the stubbornly inscrutable performance of Jimmy Tatro as Dylan Maxwell, a high school student to whom there might be more than meets the eye — but maybe not?
20. One of my favorite tweets of the year was just 

. Hanging out. Still don't know why.
21. Hari Kondabolu's documentary 

took on the use of a racist caricature on 

, a show that is beloved not only by much of current comedy royalty — who grew up with it — but also by Kondabolu himself.
22. OK, look. Darren Aronofsky's 

was not everybody's kind of movie. It definitely has a lot of overwrought, weird things in it. But the first half is less reliant on body horror crossed with religious references and more reliant on how profoundly unsettling it is when people simply don't behave according to social expectations — when people trespass both physically and behaviorally. And that half, highlighted by the growing fears of Jennifer Lawrence and the cold intrusions of Michelle Pfeiffer, works as it should.

23. "The Oscars are boring." This is not always true, but it is often true. The announcement of best picture is one of the places where it is most likely to be true. Except, of course, if someone hands the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty and it makes it to Faye Dunaway, who is so steeped in her on-with-the-show ethic and so averse to freezing on stage that she simply announces that 

, the overwhelming (and by now resented) favorite has won, when actually 

, the little movie that could, has won. And then, the people who made 

have to announce from the stage that they have to give back the Oscar. If you imagine Johnny winning the fight at the end of 

and then Daniel doing the crane kick while Johnny is getting his trophy? It was a little like that.
24. 

is the perfect contemporary romance novel for people who like their romances smart and a little offbeat.

25. It's not wrong that so much of the love of 

has been about Tiffany Haddish, who stormed that movie and took no prisoners. But what I always remember is the fight: the big fight, worse and worse, that only happens among people who truly, honestly love each other.
26. The animation in 

, Pixar's film set around Dia de los Muertos, is 

. Never more, perhaps, than with Coco herself, who represents both the difficulties and losses of aging and the resilience of the self in spite of those losses.
27. People from comedy and other arenas continue to do great work talking about the difficulties of mental illness — depression particularly. One 2017 standout was Chris Gethard, whose 

was funny but also honest and painful.

28. Films purporting to explore what life is like for poor people in the United States often fall into pity or draw maudlin portraits of noble struggle. Sean Baker's 

does neither. It lives in the largely carefree stride of young Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), but also in the thankless hustle of her young mother (Bria Vinaite), who wants desperately to do better for herself and her kid and finds it profoundly difficult.

29. Marvel, rather than adding another muscle-bound Chris to the world of superhero movies, went with Tom Holland — who actually looks like he might be in high school — to play Spider-Man. The first full-length result, 

, could have used a more fully realized villain. But the creation of Peter Parker's world, his friends, his school, and his attitude toward becoming Spider-Man set the stage for more adventures.

30. You don't realize how rarely you're caught entirely off-guard by a plot development until it happens. Late in the coming-of-age romance 

, 17-year-old Elio's relationship with his parents evolves in an unexpected way that changes the tone of the story and leads to a scene with Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio's father that will go down in film history as one of the great Dad Talks.
31. 

about running into an old boyfriend.
32. The podcast Reply All — probably my favorite reporting-based show — made a 

 this year to trace the origin of a scam tech support call, and while some elements of it were as expected, some emphatically were not.
33. Cate Blanchett's antlers in 

.
34. It's hard to name the best visual joke in the increasingly weird and great NBC comedy 

46. Basically everything Seth Meyers did with "A Closer Look." That's a funny, funny bit, and they've really let it fly.

" episode of the Gimlet podcast Heavyweight.
48. The Another Round episode 


49. My favorite contestant, Brooke Williamson, won a season of 


50. Everyone kept going, kept creating and sharing, and kept reading and watching and listening to what they love. Creativity is a glorious thing, so thanks to everybody.  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Arts and Culture

Linda Holmes

Author

It's cold outside, but we've got 50 Wonderful Things from 2017 listed on our blog. Plus, the Pop Culture Happy Hour panel digs into some of the stuff that made it a year worth watching and reading.

50 wonderful things from pop culture in 2017

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