News Reporter: Act Four: Swearing off ‘best-of’ lists

Friday 8 December 2017

Act Four: Swearing off ‘best-of’ lists

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Drogon go on the attack in the seventh season of "Game of Thrones." This scene gave me a lot of pleasure, and I'd rather talk about that than whether it was one of the best of the year. (HBO)

As regular readers of this column know, I’m not really one for ranked year-end lists. Part of it is that I’m a critic-at-large rather than a critic devoted to a single medium, so my consumption is inherently eccentric; I may be pretty efficient, but I am sadly not possessed of a time-turner that would allow me to watch all television and read all books and also make it to Sundance, Telluride and Toronto for the year’s big film festivals. But because I do try to keep up as best I can, I’ve tended to make some exceptions to that general rule, especially for my friend Alan Sepinwall’s big survey of television critics.

This year, though, I bowed out, and I think it’s probably time for me to bow out of making any lists that presume to anoint a year’s-best permanently. The truth is that my brain is generally organized around themes, anyway, so I’m more likely to associate five TV shows, three movies and a book in my head than I am to think comparatively in terms of quality. And since I’ve started doing big projects like my look at policing and pop culture, or my deep dive into Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” my time has been even more jumbled up; it’s as if I’m suddenly covering film, and television, and books and all media related to the Vietnam War as if it’s a whole separate beat.

None of this is a complaint! In fact, the ability to do big projects is one of my favorite parts of my job. But because it’s also a fundamental realignment of my job, there will be no lists that presume to tell you what was best this year. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a fun new video series about 2017 in culture that will be accompanied by some pieces on the big themes of the year. I’ll tell you what I felt most passionate about, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m absolutely sure that’s the same thing as what’s best. And that’s actually a bit of a relief; what we respond to in culture is so personal that while it’s fun to argue about best-of lists, it’s hard to make that case that any one critic is right about them. So let’s close out this year talking about what we loved, what we hated and what moved us instead of trying to aim for an arbitrary classification.

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