2016 in entertainment and pop culture: the good, the great, the weird – The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2016-12-28T15:36:17+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/rss/stream/13803693 https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Verge Staff <![CDATA[Our favorite pop culture of 2016]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/28/14099288/best-movies-music-tv-2016-beyonce-steven-universe-gravity-falls 2016-12-28T10:36:17-05:00 2016-12-28T10:36:17-05:00

Here in the final week of 2016, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago has reached its height in the pop-culture universe. This week, we look back on some of the best entertainment experiences we had in 2016 - the things that made our jobs and our lives worth it.

Don't miss our previous best-ofs:

The pre-2016 entertainment that got us through 2016

The weirdest pop-culture of 2016

The worst pop-culture of 2016

Drinking the lemonade: Seeing Beyoncé live!

We almost didn't make it to the final performance of Beyoncé's Formation World Tour in October. A three-hour traffic jam at the Holland Tunnel stood between us and the Jersey bo …

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]]> Andrew Liptak <![CDATA[The 11 best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2016]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/28/13792040/sci-fi-fantasy-book-year-in-review-best-of-2016 2016-12-28T10:00:01-05:00 2016-12-28T10:00:01-05:00

We're living in a world that looks increasingly like science fiction, so I find myself looking to the genre not for predictions of what the future holds but for some guidance for dealing with this strange and changing world. 2016 was a difficult year, but a bounty of fantastic science fiction and fantasy novels were helpful in not simply escaping the present, but confronting it.

Here's the best of what the year had to offer.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

All the Birds in the Sky is as witty as it is smart. I used to work with Charlie Jane Anders when she was the editor-in-chief of Gawker's io9. The novel affords her a leng …

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]]> Andrew Webster <![CDATA[10 amazing games you may have missed this year]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/27/13973572/hidden-gem-video-games-2016-mini-metro-really-bad-chess 2016-12-27T10:00:01-05:00 2016-12-27T10:00:01-05:00

2016 was a great year for big games. There were fantastic sequels like Uncharted 4 and Final Fantasy XV, long-awaited adventures like The Witness and The Last Guardian, along with fantastic indie gems like Firewatch and Inside. But amidst all of the big names, the year was also filled with many smaller, yet equally enticing experiences that you may have missed. There's everything from cute horror games to futuristic puzzle boxes to heartbreaking true stories. Here are 10 of my favorite hidden gems from 2016.

Yomawari: Night Alone

Yomawari: A Night Alone (PC, PS Vita)

Yomawari is a deceptive game. It looks cute, starring an adorable schoolgirl with a big red bow i …

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]]> Micah Singleton Kaitlyn Tiffany <![CDATA[2016: the year music went ‘exclusive’]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/23/14047090/music-exclusives-apple-music-vs-tidal-2016 2016-12-23T11:00:02-05:00 2016-12-23T11:00:02-05:00

Whether it was what she intended or not, Taylor Swift threw down the "exclusive" gauntlet with her 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed about the future of streaming services. In it, she referred to music as something "important and rare," and therefore, "valuable." She was arguing about something only tangentially related to streaming exclusives, but she was also framing a mindset towards music that would morph into the industry standard over the next two years. And last summer, when she gave only Apple permission to stream her album 1989, she planted the seed of a powerful idea. In 2016, another year of war between the big three on-demand stream …

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]]> Tasha Robinson <![CDATA[The 15 best movies of 2016]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/22/14060580/best-movies-2016-film-moonlight-la-la-land-handmaiden 2016-12-22T15:03:02-05:00 2016-12-22T15:03:02-05:00

La La Land

La La Land's immense popularity with critics and industry insiders isn't hard to understand: Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood, and cinephiles love movies about loving movies. Damien Chazelle's follow-up to Whiplash is both. His swoony, playful, often deeply melancholy musical fantasy about two Hollywood up-and-comers (Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling) echoes the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, imitating their energy, then stepping back to enjoy a warm, longing nostalgia for their heyday. Choreographer Mandy Moore deliberately quotes Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins, so the dance sequences feel comfort …

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]]> Verge Staff <![CDATA[The worst pop culture of 2016]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/13972438/worst-pop-culture-2016-colin-jost-pepe-david-bowie 2016-12-21T10:49:58-05:00 2016-12-21T10:49:58-05:00
Matt Furie mourns his frog character Pepe becoming a racist pro-Trump meme. | Matt Furie, The Nib

As we head into the final weeks of 2016, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago is engulfing the pop culture universe. This week, we look back on some of the most awful, inexplicable entertainment we experienced in 2016 - the "how did this get made, and why did we suffer through it?" memes, moments, and movies that made our jobs harder and our lives sadder.

Don't miss our previous best-ofs:

The pre-2016 entertainment that got us through 2016

The weirdest pop-culture of 2016

Harambe

Harambe was a gorilla shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo employee back in May after it looked like he might harm a three-year-old boy who got into …

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]]> Lizzie Plaugic <![CDATA[Crying basketball boy is my favorite YouTube video of 2016]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14025454/crying-basketball-player-boston-college-going-out-to-eat 2016-12-20T12:39:31-05:00 2016-12-20T12:39:31-05:00

I'm not talking about Crying Jordan, I'm talking about Crying Clifford. Clifford, as in Dennis Clifford, the Boston College basketball player who had a tough time at a press conference this year after his team lost the final game of their losing-streak season. Do you remember this video? I think it may be my favorite one of 2016. It goes like this:

REPORTER: "Cliff, what're you gonna take away as your best memory from playing basketball at Boston College?"

CLIFFORD: "…Prolly just… like…"

[CLIFF SHAKES HEAD, LOWERS HEAD A LITTLE, LOWERS HEAD MORE, HANGS HEAD, SNIFFLES, SNIFFLES, 15 SECONDS PASS SLOWLY, THE ANTICIPATION IS REACHING UNPRECED …

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]]> Chris Plante Sam Byford <![CDATA[2016 revived the first-person shooter genre]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14025690/best-video-games-2016-shooters-fps 2016-12-20T12:24:02-05:00 2016-12-20T12:24:02-05:00

Before we dig into 2016, let's review 2015. Let's revisit The Verge's list of best games of last year, and the only traditional first-person shooter that made the cut was The Taken King, an expansion to 2014's Destiny. Fallout 4 is on here, too, which is a role-playing game, albeit one with plenty of guns and opportunities to shoot people in the head. So our favorite shooters were an add-on and RPG: not a good year for the genre.

For comparison's sake, we jotted down a list of shooters we considered for our Best of 2016 list, and we have five choices: Doom, Overwatch, Battlefield 1, Superhot, and Titanfall 2. If we expand our scope to inclu …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[3% and The Thinning are this year’s best and worst take on dystopian meritocracy]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/15/13973578/netflix-3-percent-youtube-the-thinning-ya-dystopia-review 2016-12-15T15:23:02-05:00 2016-12-15T15:23:02-05:00

One of my favorite Twitter accounts is @DystopianYA, a parody of young-adult science fiction by Observer culture writer Dana Schwartz. Its tweets are a mix of the bland platitudes, clichéd rebellion, and on-the-nose metaphors we associate with bad YA dystopia - our old teen angst dressed up in neologisms. "You must complete trials in order to move into adulthood," reads one of the more popular tweets. "They're called 'the SATs' - no wait sorry I meant 'The Trials.' Yeah that's it."

This tweet essentially describes the plot of two recent projects: The Thinning, an original movie produced for YouTube Red, and 3%, a Brazilian science-fiction s …

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]]> Lizzie Plaugic <![CDATA[This year, Shia LaBeouf became a new kind of interactive celebrity]]> https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/14/13954788/shia-labeouf-2016-take-me-anywhere-twitter-livestreaming 2016-12-14T11:42:37-05:00 2016-12-14T11:42:37-05:00

For the actor and artist currently known as Shia LaBeouf, 2016 was a mellow year, comparatively speaking. In the previous three years, LaBeouf plagiarized graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, got arrested during the intermission of a Broadway musical, and quit the production of a different Broadway play, apparently over disagreements with his co-star, Alec Baldwin. In the court of public opinion, LaBeouf was edging toward child-actor stereotype - although he had successfully transitioned from precocious child star to "serious actor," he seemed to be breaking down in the process. Until, on the last day of 2013, he sent this tweet:

LaBeou …

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