The Daily Beast’s Obsessed Critics’ Most Delicious Pans From the Last Year
The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, your favorite pop-culture website and ours, turned 1 this week! To celebrate, we’re taking a look back at some of the best content we produced in our first year.
One of the things we take the most pride in as entertainment enthusiasts is guiding you through the glut of TV shows and movies out there towards the ones that are most worth your time. Perhaps more importantly, we hope to steer you away from those that aren’t.
In that spirit, here’s a list of some of the most delicious pans of TV series and films that our critics wrote this year. Some of them are reviews of what were legitimately the worst things we had the misfortune to watch; others are just fantastically written. That’s to say that, even if we didn’t think you should watch these particular projects, you’ll have a great time reading our writing about them.
Babylon
“Babylon boasts multiple sights that serve as metaphors for itself: an elephant showering an immigrant man with shit; a woman urinating all over the body and face of a wealthy paramour; a beauty projectile vomiting on a dapper gentleman; a burly psychopath chomping on a live rat; and a pitiful sad sack getting his head stuck in a toilet.” — Nick Schager
Babylon
The Flash
“The Flash’s achievements are the kind that make for good in-flight movie fare: It’s familiar, easygoing, and amusing. But to offer the film any kind of praise is an uneasy task, because its star is one of the most controversial Hollywood figures in recent memory.” — Allegra Frank
Futurama
“While Futurama has never been bereft of jokes, what made its original run so spectacular in the first place was that its jokes were exciting, refreshing, and always complemented by character-driven storytelling. Hulu’s Futurama, referred to as Season 11, decides to cut things off at the “joke” part and leave much of the rest of it behind.” — AF
Ghosted
“Ghosted is a big-budget, star-studded action-romance premiering on Apple TV+, although a more fitting destination for it would be a dark closet on a high shelf where no one might ever find it.” — NS
Gossip Girl
“Despite its prevalence in the cultural lexicon, the word “gaslighting” is still a very real term used by highly qualified mental health professionals. It’s also used when describing what it’s like to watch Season 2 of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot.” — Coleman Spilde
Ghosted
Gutsy
“It feels passé, in fall 2022, to make a girlboss joke—and yet, with their new Apple TV+ project Gutsy, Chelsea and Hillary Clinton have basically done just that. Premiering Friday, the series claims to celebrate “the world’s boldest and bravest women—from household names to unsung heroes.” At times, it succeeds. Too often, however, it feels like those “household names” are engaged in a little brand management.” — Laura Bradley
Heart of Stone
“Heart of Stone stars Gal Gadot as Rachel Stone, a secret agent who completes her assignments by using an AI known as the Heart, and yes, this is a real movie and not some Saturday Night Live sketch or social-media meme. Nonetheless, as far as feature-length films go, it’s certainly an unintentionally amusing joke.” — NS
Insidious: The Red Door
“Insidious: The Red Door may be the ugliest movie of 2023, less because of Wilson’s framing and camerawork (which are reasonably assured) than because of his decision to drench everything in sewage-y hues or, just as often, opaque gloom. His aesthetic seems to be “inside of a garbage disposal,” and it undercuts the action’s intermittent flickers of energy.” —NS
The Obsessies! Our Awards for the Last Year in Pop Culture
Kindred
“Decades of acclaim made Kindred an obvious candidate for the first Octavia E. Butler adaptation. But Hulu’s take on Kindred is likely not what Butler fans have clamored for.” — AF
Mafia Mamma
“Once the fabulous title card fades, the film plummets in a state of total, tragic freefall. Its descent may be occasionally suspended in air by the luminosity of Collette and Bellucci, but even their committed performances aren’t enough to hold up the weight of the cinder blocks strapped to Mafia Mamma’s proverbial feet.” — CS
Maybe I Do
“Nothing actually happens in Maybe I Do. While that’s not always a negative factor in movies, it’s not really what you want from a rom-com, where yearning plays out over dinner, hands brush at museums, or three dads visit a Greek island to meet their long-lost daughter.” — Fletcher Peters
The Flash
MILF Manor
“The show purely exists to inspire “WTF” reactions, clickbait headlines about mothers feeling up their sons, and total outrage. Perhaps Fox News will drum up a segment about the lack of family values from the so-called “Learning Channel”—oh wait, it already has—even though Rupert Murdoch has a penchant for women at least 30 years younger than him.”
Murder Mystery 2
“A sub-Agatha Christie affair that was primarily notable for its flat tone, lethargic plotting, and leads’ lack of comic chemistry, it proved a whodunit that was so unfunny its only real mystery involved figuring out where the filmmakers expected viewers to laugh.” — NS
Purple Hearts
“What happens when a girl “blue heart” and a boy “red heart” love each other very much? They create a “purple heart.” That’s the Birds and the Bees 101, guys. This “purple heart” BS is the entire basis of Purple Hearts, which finds one Democrat woman falling in love with a Republican soldier.” — FP
The Daily Beast’s Obsessed’s Best TV Show and Movie Reviews From the Last Year
The Real Friends of WeHo
“Nobody asked for this. There was not one single person in the world who was looking at the scope of reality television offerings across the world and thought to themselves, “You know what we really need? A show about six conceited gay men talking about how great they are, nonstop, for an hour.” — CS
Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Ex-Wives Club
“While these women contribute a lot to their individual franchises, we learn very quickly—at least in the RHUGT’s first three episodes—that they might not have much to bring to their expansive rental in Thailand aside from stale, rolled-over conflicts and Marysol’s bedazzled tumblers. The end result is a boozy, somehow less riveting version of Lord of The Flies with Heather as the group’s Simon.” — Kyndall Cunningham
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
“She-Hulk is not only a disservice to art that explores these things in more transgressive, thoughtful ways, but an insult to its viewers who are more than capable of digesting cultural criticism with a little nuance.” — CS
Tetris
Somebody I Used To Know
“When 21 Jump Street actor Dave Franco revealed that he and his wife, actress Alison Brie, had co-written an ‘elevated’ romantic comedy in 2020, the Internet—or at least the side that really gives a damn about rom-coms—was set ablaze with criticisms. What does an ‘elevated’ rom-com mean? Why work in a genre that you seemingly dislike enough to distinguish your film as ‘elevated?’” — KC
The Son
“Only tragedy can ensue when no one knows about depression (its symptoms, its causes, its treatments), and ensue it most certainly does, after two lugubrious hours of adults crying, fuming, and acting like uninformed dolts.” — NS
Spirited
“Judging by the art alone, the two look like a couple of demented Newsies that were cut from the cast and are stomping their way into your home for a dose of singsong-y revenge. Unfortunately, my friends, Spirited is a fate worse than that.” — CS
Strange World
“Strange World has landed neither with a bang nor a whimper. Instead, the biggest studio in the world has released a new feature film with practically zero fanfare.” — AF
Teen Wolf: The Movie
“Expanding the Teen Wolf universe without Dylan O’Brien is sort of like making a Sex and the City reboot without Samantha or an O.C. movie without Seth Cohen. Sure, you can try your best to fill in those gaps with other storylines and new characters, but audiences will always be left a little disappointed.” — KC
Tetris
“Tetris’ inability to decide what it wants to be is its ultimate downfall, as it goes to over-the-top lengths to keep up the Cold War thriller antics. The film throws snarling, accented villains at a defiant American that keeps outfoxing them. Its eleventh-hour car chase would make for great parody if it weren’t so earnest.” — AF
Ticket to Paradise
“If we wanted to see George and Julia, our old pals, goofing around, we could just watch videos from the press tour for this film. As much as I wanted to add Ticket to Paradise to my lengthy list of rom-coms to watch over and over again, unfortunately, I’ll have to resort to those promo YouTube clips and Ocean’s Eleven instead.” — FP
Ticket to Paradise
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
“To avoid copyright-infringement violations, Frake-Waterfield’s Pooh doesn’t utter any of his famous exclamations (“Oh, bother!”), nor does he hang out with springy Tigger. What he does do is bludgeon, stab, and stalk his prey like a monster, which is crushingly juvenile and groan-worthy.” — NS
You People
“Simply put, it’s not enough to depict the obvious tensions between Black and white people, which You People does to nauseating effect. At some point, you have to read between the lines and present something interesting.” — KC
Your Place or Mine
“Though Your Place of Mine has many signature rom-com elements—the houses are big, bright, and beautiful; the cities sparkle while our leads fall in love; the side characters are quippy and fun—the romantic heart of the movie is drained into a dry, soulless dump.” — FP
Zoey 102
“Zoey 102 is like most modern reboots that aren’t nearly as satisfying as watching the original product. Maybe if the film were willing to tackle the anxieties of modern womanhood in a more specific, less superficial way, it would at least give viewers the opportunity to be surprised.” — KC
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