The A.V. Club - Best of

Best Of 2011: Best of: Podmass’ best podcasts of 2011

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

When we wrote about our favorite podcasts for the first time last year, we kept it casual: A core of A.V. Club podcast fans collaborated on a list of some of the best ones in rotation on our iPods. With the debut of our Podmass feature in February, though, we now had a large group of contributors listening to upwards of 40 podcasts every week. So this year we made our best podcasts feature more formal: Like our best comedy albums story, those who voted had 50 points to dole out to five podcasts, with no podcast earning more ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best comics of 2011: Graphic novels & art comics

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Even more than most list-making endeavors, rounding up the best comics of the year is complicated. Does a single 32-page issue of an ongoing series belong on the same list as a 500-page novel? What about books that were published years ago in Japan or Europe but are just now making it Stateside? And where should archival collections go? In the interest of fairness—and operating under the theory that it’s better to be inclusive than exclusive when it comes to praise—this list has been broken up into five categories. The main category is “Original Graphic Novels,” which ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best comics of 2011: Superhero and mainstream

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Superheroes flooded movie screens, publishers transitioned to digital, and entire lines were rebooted in 2011, a turning point for the comic-book industry. The year started with Marvel and DC struggling to hold on to readers, with rising prices and event fatigue forcing drastic measures that significantly changed the second half of 2011. The DC relaunch, combined with Marvel’s restructuring of its mutant, street-level, and Ultimate titles, has resulted in higher-quality superhero comics, while Image Comics has risen as the patron publisher for creator-owned titles. Digital comics are changing the way comics are bought and read, and by the end ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best books we read in 2011

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:01:00 -0600

Every year, The A.V. Club embarks upon elaborate voting rituals to determine the sorta-consensus best films, albums, and television of the year. But finding the best books of the year is a different experience. Since we cultivate the most eclectic selection of tastes we can for the book-review section in order to cover the widest range of work we can, there’s rarely a lot of crossover in what we read. And no one reviewer can even come close to reading all the notable books of the year. So every year, we go simple with the best-of-books piece, simply ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The least essential albums of 2011

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

Each year, The A.V. Club scours the depths of our music slush pile in the quest for the least essential albums of the year. Though we wouldn’t call any of this music “good,” our goal isn’t to find the worst the year had to offer, but rather the music that had the absolute least real justification for existing, from pointless reissues to lumbering supergroups to lazy covers albums. As usual, 2011 offered plenty of music no one really needed to hear. Let’s take a moment to remember it before it fades into the oblivion it so ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best games of 2011

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:01:00 -0600

‪We assembled our top-10 list in the usual way. All of the regular contributors to The A.V. Club’s game section made a bunch of ballots with numbers on them. We added the numbers up. We talked over the list and tweaked it. We cheated with a couple of ties, because we can. This year, each writer also made a not-top-10 selection. Don’t think of these as the “Tied for 11th place” games. (That pseudo-scientific ranking business ends with the main list.) Rather, this eclectic mix is more like the “Staff Picks” shelf at a video store, back ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best browser games of 2011

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:01:00 -0600

‪The Sawbuck Gamer column, our recurring roundup of free and dirt-cheap games, is notorious for destroying readers’ productivity with the siren song of interactive procrastination. While you’re home for the holidays, however, it can serve an even nobler purpose: helping you ignore your relatives. Below are our favorite free browser games from the year in Sawbuck. The list contains more than enough instant-gratification gaming to distract you while your right-wing uncle rants about Hawaiian birth certificates, your sister preaches the benefits of raw-locavore veganism, and everyone has the annual argument over what to do about Grandpa. Just bury your ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The Year In Swag 2011: The wallowing in luxury edition

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

As the means of producing music, books, and even films become cheaper and more accessible every year, the marketplace is increasingly crowded with culture, and the big companies are fighting to stay at the top of the heap. Fortunately for us, they often do this by taking advantage of their deep pockets and trying to bribe us, the critical community, with free stuff, branded in clever or not-so-clever ways to remind us of upcoming releases. No matter how bad the economy gets, we here at The A.V. Club know we’ll be doing just fine, since we’re up ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The worst TV of 2011

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

It’s rare for the best series on television to attract huge audiences, but it’s equally rare for the very worst series to manage the same feat. Indeed, only three series out of the 10 worst of 2011 were renewed for second seasons, and all of those are on cable (evidently the best place to keep the worst and best TV alive). On the other hand, two of our network selections have gotten full-season pickups, so the Big Five may yet reclaim their crown. Fortunately, many of the worst shows of 2011 were so execrable that they were chased ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: Holiday Highlight Reel: Ghosts of A.V. Club past

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

Because we know your lives are too busy to read every single word we publish, and because now is the time of year for giving, we’ve decided to send you back into A.V. Club days of yore with some holiday-related links. These are stories from years past that pertain to the holidays, and that we think you’ll enjoy—whether for the first time, or as a holiday refresher. So join us please for this 2006 Crosstalk titled “Does Christmas music suck?” We fail to find an answer, but it’s a lively discussion nonetheless. We actually sort ...

TV: Best of: Beyond the Top 30: other 2011 TV highlights

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

The problem with the existence of so many TV networks and so many good TV shows is that something worth watching is almost always airing somewhere. That means a lot of good shows didn’t make our list of the best television series, including plenty of the more niche programs not all of our writers were able to watch. Here, in chronological order, is a tribute to the best installments of the very good, tiny, inconsistent, and/or downright weird shows that either just missed our main list, or weren’t in the running, but merited special recognition. Portlandia, “Farm ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: Best TV of 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:03:00 -0600

This year saw so much good television that narrowing our list of the top programs to 30 and our “top episodes from shows other than our top 30” list to 50 proved remarkably difficult. It was a year when comedy solidified its return as a creative force in the television industry, from big network hits like Happy Endings to cable cult shows like Childrens Hospital. It was a year when there were great dramas all over the dial, from FX to HBO to CBS. And it was a year in which two miniseries reminded us of the strength of that ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best TV series of 2011: The ballots

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

For the first time this year, The A.V. Club’s TV writers followed the lead of their music-critic colleagues and determined the top 30 TV series of the year using an elaborate point system. Each writer was granted 150 points to distribute to 15 series; the maximum points a series could receive was 15, with the minimum being one. Read on below to find out how many points a writer gave to each series, along with some thoughts and commentary on a handful of the nearly 70 shows that didn’t make the top 30. THE BALLOTS Erik Adams ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The TV Club Awards 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

For the second year in a row, The A.V. Club looked at its year-end TV coverage and said, “Wait, there’s a lot of weird stuff that happened between the margins that can’t be summed up in simple ‘best of’ and ‘worst of’ lists.” In celebration of everything that falls between the sublime and the ridiculous—you know, like Mrs. Coach from Friday Night Lights carrying a demon seed and being thrown into the loony bin on American Horror Story—we proudly present this edition of The TV Club Awards in all its hyper-specific glory. Word repeated most ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The A.V. Club’s 2011 Highlight Reel

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

‪We try not to toot our own horns too loudly around here at The A.V. Club—we’re all nerdy wallflowers, after all—but we realize that you might’ve missed some fantastic things we published this year. In service of those words (and occasionally moving pictures), we’ve decided to gather some of our favorite articles from 2011 into one big link orgy. It would be your greatest gift to us if you could spend a few hours clicking through and reading (or even re-reading) every word. Early this year, we launched a new feature type called For ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The worst films of 2011

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

We've looked at the best films of 2011, and spotlighted some titles we feared might get overlooked. Now, without further ado, here are our picks for the worst the year had to offer. 20. The Dilemma/Zookeeper Kevin James seems like a nice enough guy, and he has a fundamental likability that serves him well as a comic and an actor, so it’s hard to begrudge him his decision to star in one broad, lightweight comedy after another. But jeez, do they all have to be so same-y and condescending? Whether James is playing a car designer whose ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: Best films of 2011

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:02:00 -0600

How good was 2011 for cinema? So good that even an unusually tepid awards-season crop didn’t keep us from expanding from our Top 10 lists to a Top 15 (plus a bonus five), which still left a diversity of great films off our ballots. If there’s a common theme to the year’s best, it’s the wealth of ambitious personal visions, from Terrence Malick evoking creation to tell the story of his upbringing in The Tree Of Life to Martin Scorsese channeling his boyhood enthusiasm for spectacle in Hugo to Kenneth Lonergan finally delivering the beautiful, wounded ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: 2011: The year in band names

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:01:00 -0600

‪With the rise of simply monikered bands like Yuck, The Weeknd, Real Estate, Blouse, Corridor, Cave, and others, perhaps the world has never needed more bizarrely—or at least memorably—named groups. Who’s going to remember a name like Girls when Vomit Erection is out there? Yes, the lyrics to the latter’s “Warm Diarrhoea [sic] Blasts On My Face” are objectionable and the music nonsensical, but godammit, it’s a name you won’t forget. The A.V. Club sees thousands of band names every year, and we don’t notice most of them. We keep a list ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: The best comedy albums of 2011

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:01:00 -0600

‪Even before the Internet wrecked the music industry, comedy albums were notoriously low sellers, and it could be argued that podcasts have marginalized them even more over the past few years. But the need for a comedian to have a solid hour (or even 45 minutes) of material will never die, and so long as that remains, comedy albums will have a reason to exist. We’re better for it, if 2011’s bumper crop of albums is any indication. To celebrate that bounty, The A.V. Club decided to vote on the year’s best comedy albums for the ...

Best Of 2011: Best of: A year in song (40 great tracks in 40 sentences)

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:00:00 -0600

No matter how much some atmospherics-obsessed musicos want to pretend that sonic innovation or raggedness or melancholy mood-setting are what makes artists “important,” my criteria is simpler: Do they have any songs that would make someone who’d never heard them before ask, “Hey, who’s this?” Not all of the acts below put out albums in 2011 that I could wholeheartedly recommend, but these songs are all mixtape-approved. Spotify playlist for "A Year In Song" by Noel Murray Ryan Adams, “Lucky Now”: Adams’ long-awaited Ashes & Fire is a touch too staid overall, but Adams’ flair for effortlessly catchy, pretty ...