2017 in entertainment and pop culture: the good, the great, the weird – The Verge

The Verge’s favorite TV episodes of 2017

2018-01-02T11:42:08-05:00

The problem with great TV in 2017 was that there was so much of it. These days, there are so many TV recommendations and must-sees that leisure starts to feel like homework. ("You absolutely have to watch this! And you have to see it from the beginning! There are five seasons so far!") That's why we're wrapping up our 2017 year-end summary coverage by trying to boil down our favorite 2017 television experiences into something approachable: a single episode that summed up why we love our favorite shows.

Spoilers ahead for these specific episodes.

The Leftovers, "The Most Powerful Man in the World"

HBO's baffling, maddening, beautiful series …

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The movies that transported and troubled us in 2017

2017-12-31T17:00:18-05:00

The Shape of Water

Throughout the final week of 2017, culture writers from across Vox Media will be chatting about the best works of the year. In this installment, Vox's Todd VanDerWerff, Alissa Wilkinson, and Genevieve Koski; The Verge's Tasha Robinson; and Polygon's Julia Alexander talk about the movies of 2017.

Todd VanDerWerff: My favorite movies in 2017 weren't escapism, not precisely, but they did take me so thoroughly out of my own point of view that reentering reality afterward could feel a little like resurfacing after a deep-sea dive. From the intimate details of Lady Bird to the bleakly comedic terror of Get Out, from the cat's-eye-view shots of Ke …

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The best science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels of 2017

2017-12-29T10:38:45-05:00

2017 was a hard year for a lot of people. With climate change, haywire politics, and tech companies running amok, there are lots of reasons to put the year in the rearview mirror. But through it all, a run of great books shined a light in the darkness. They built off and commented on the issues that dominated the year, going beyond mere escapism to provide thoughtful, damning, and entertaining reads to keep us sane.

Here are the best books of 2017.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

In the near future, teenage girls begin spontaneously developing electrical powers, thanks to a small muscle called the "skein" that's found only in women. The girls …

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The year we wanted the internet to be smaller

2017-12-28T13:37:37-05:00

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Americans got tired of big social media in 2017. Or at least, we stopped wanting to look at it, and we stopped pretending to like it.

This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it's true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans' attitudes towards tech's biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they "greatly" or "somewhat" disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Mor …

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The weirdest pop culture of 2017

2017-12-28T09:00:04-05:00

2017 was, to put it lightly, a weird year, so there are a lot of runners-up for the strangest cultural moments it produced. In no particular order: the short-lived fad for licking Nintendo Switch cartridges to see if they really do taste bad (and licking other technology for comparison). The day white supremacists and Insane Clown Posse fans both marched on Washington, prompting widespread calls on social media for a Juggalo vs. Nazi deathmatch. The trend toward ads cheerfully acknowledging that millennials should expect miserable working conditions and unsatisfying lives, and buy stuff to compensate. Yes, all of these were strange indeed, a …

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The worst pop culture of 2017

2017-12-27T11:20:56-05:00

As we head into the final weeks of 2017, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago is engulfing the pop culture universe. But amid all the best-of lists and greatest-moments roundups, we tend to forget the other side of the coin - 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. Here, we asked our staff: what in the cultural world made you question humanity in 2017?

Fake news

Is there a word for the peculiar synesthesia that makes a written phrase sound like nails on a chalkboard? "Fake news" was that phrase in 2017. It was originally, and somewh …

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The pre-2017 entertainment that got us through 2017

2017-12-26T10:05:58-05:00

Once again, the year is winding down, and everybody under the sun is looking back at the past year's news and culture as if the world began on January 1st, 2017. But while the hype cycle operates in tidy annual waves, our lives don't. As part of our usual look back at our favorite things of the year, we're acknowledging the things we loved in 2017 that didn't come out in 2017, and talking about how those new-to-us discoveries and late-arrival favorites got us through another tumultuous year.

Fallout 4

I tend to stockpile video games I'm interested in, only jumping in later when the impulse (and free time) strikes. The downside is that I'm ye …

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2017 was YouTube’s best year ever. It was also its worst.

2017-12-22T10:28:36-05:00

2017 was a wild year for YouTube. It continued to extend its dominance as the world's biggest video platform: in June it announced that 1.5 billion people now log in each month, a user base second only to Facebook's and one that can earn successful creators a substantial windfall. According to recent analysis by Forbes, the top ten channels on YouTube earned $127 million in 2017, an increase of 80 percent from the year before.

But in terms of its public image, 2017 was also the worst year YouTube has ever had. It began with the downfall of the platform's biggest star, PewDiePie. After a Wall Street Journal report about his use of Nazi image …

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The 10 best comics of 2017

2017-12-22T06:00:02-05:00

DC Comics, Supergirl: Being Super | Image: DC Comics

2017 was a good year for comics. Creators young and old sent green shoots up through desiccated genres - everything from memoir to textbook to all-ages fantasy burst with talent this year. Kids continued to storm bookstores, libraries, and specialty comic shops for gems like Ru Xu's NewsPrints and Victoria Jamieson's All's Faire in Middle School. Superhero aficionados enjoyed thoughtful beat-em-ups courtesy of Christopher Priest and Carlo Pagulayan's Deathstroke. Nonfiction readers were stirred by Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do and Roz Chast's Going Into Town.

Winnowing down this embarrassment of riches is no small feat - but the people dem …

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The 20 best TV shows of 2017

2017-12-21T13:29:13-05:00

Picking the best television shows of any given year used to be relatively easy, back when the major networks and a few powerful cable channels dominated the cultural conversation. These days, though, making any list of must-see TV is a downright Sisyphean. It's impossible to keep up with everything worthy of consideration in television, so best-of lists inevitably become idiosyncratic, determined in large part by whatever limited pool of series a critic regularly watches.

But a handful of dramas and sitcoms clearly stood out this year, demonstrating levels of aesthetic, narrative, and thematic ambition that would've been hard for anyone pay …

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