The TV Shows and Movies We Were Most Obsessed With This Last Year

We’re certain you’ve heard the news—it’s all Hollywood’s talking about—but The Daily Beast’s Obsessed is celebrating its one-year anniversary this week. (Babies grow up fast!)

To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting our best content from the past year. One of the things that’s been most fun for us at Obsessed is being able to, well, obsessively cover the TV shows, movies, and celebrity stories we can’t stop thinking about from as many angles, perspectives, and voices as possible. So we thought we’d ring in the big anniversary by going back through just that: the stories we were most preoccupied with and wrote about the most, which lived throughout the year in the section of our site we lovingly call the “Obsessional.”

It’s a really fun trip down memory lane. We’re grateful you’re going down with us, and hopefully you’ll follow us moving forward as we continue all of our obsessing!

Abbott Elementary

Something remarkable happened in this last year: We all rallied around something nice, that made us all very happy. Imagine! To celebrate Abbott Elementary’s general wonderfulness, we went all-in on coverage. We gave Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Emmy speech a standing ovation, breathed a sigh of relief that Season 2 was just as good as its first, interviewed breakout stars like Chris Perfetti and William Stanford Davis, and chronicled every update in TV’s best will-they/won’t-they relationship.

Barbie

First of all, we need to thank Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for creating a blockbuster film that has the same color palette as The Daily Beast’s Obsessed’s design. Our site has been gorgeous for months, as we kicked off our Barbie movie obsession when those set photos leaked, continued it through the first trailer and character posters, and then produced an endless parade of content when the movie finally came out. Covering Barbie felt like a calling, and we rose to the occasion.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

The current state of Marvel films, not to mention their future, is fodder for hot debate. But one thing we agreed on was the emotional power of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It paid fitting tribute to late star Chadwick Boseman, set up a female-centric future for Marvel, and featured a towering performance from Angela Bassett that some of us are still upset didn’t win her the Oscar.

Don’t Worry Darling

Every disastrous twist in the Don’t Worry Darling press cycle was more outrageous than the one before it—to both our bafflement and delight. Who would’ve thought a dramatic breakup and custody battle would factor so heavily into the discourse? Or the question of whether or not Harry Styles spit on his co-star? Or, for Pete’s sake, Olivia Wilde’s recipe for salad dressing? When the movie turned out to be a mess, we were all over that too.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

That Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated The Daily Beast’s Obsessed’s first official Oscar season was so exciting to us. It’s a movie about extreme emotion that challenges how audiences think about “important” movies, celebrates inclusion, and afforded the occasion to celebrate two industry stars who were long overdue for accolades. It elicits passion on a wide spectrum, which is exactly what we love to write about.

The Flash

There was already going to be much to dissect with The Flash, the DC superhero movie that heralded the end of Zach Snyder’s 10-year superhero experiment. Then the film itself became overshadowed—rightfully—by the disturbing allegations against its star, Ezra Miller. It was a balance to treat the question of how appropriate it is to have Miller in the film, given those allegations, with the seriousness that conversation deserved, while also digging into the more fun elements of the film, like its parade of cameos.

The Idol

Sometimes, a TV show is so bad that you can’t look away, no matter how much you want to. That was certainly the case with The Idol, an epic failure of a series with behind-the-scenes controversy as upsetting as the calamity we were forced to watch on screen each week. Still, a trainwreck like this leaves a lot to obsess over.

Nope

When Jordan Peele’s sci-fi thriller Nope came out, we were on deck to answer all the burning questions, like: Could it really be as good as the trailer suggested? (Yes.) How is Keke Palmer that magnetic? (Unanswerable.) Where in the hell were its Oscar nominations? (A travesty.) And what exactly did that alien look like? (A fancy squid, a mutant butterfly, or a regal labia.) The movie came out just as The Daily Beast’s Obsessed was set to launch, and it was the perfect film to herald our debut with.

Oppenheimer

The Barbenheimer weekend was a thrill for us, not just because they are two projects rich with things to discuss and obsess over. They both also happened to be really good. It was a thrill to discover Oppenheimer was the best movie Christopher Nolan’s ever made, and then dig into everything notable about it. We wrote about those sex scenes, the redemption of Rami Malek, Emily Blunt’s role, and Nolan’s not-great history writing female characters. And, of course, we went long on that amazing bomb sequence, as it deserved.

The Other Two

The Other Two satirized Hollywood more sharply and brutally than perhaps any TV comedy since 30 Rock, which easily explains our rabid obsession with it. We chatted with our favorite actors from the show, attempted to get to the bottom of what made it so damn funny, and bowed down to its epic Ellen DeGeneres joke. Then, when the series ended in an ugly scandal that could very well have been a plot on the show, we mourned—but covered that too.

The Real Housewives

We launched with a swan dive down a rabbit hole of Bravo coverage and haven’t come up for air yet. We navigated the rabid fans at BravoCon, spelunked through the scariest place on the internet (Ramona Singer’s Instagram account), interviewed everyone from Sonja Morgan to Heather Gay, sailed through the dramatic waters of Below Deck, and went deep on our coverage of every Real Housewives franchise. When things got messy, we mentioned it all. And when the single greatest eight minutes of television aired, we thanked God/Andy Cohen for our blessings.

Reality TV Dating Shows

We’re not just Bravo fans here. We’re equal-opportunity enthusiasts of all reality TV—especially when it comes to dating shows. Love Is Blind is a series that certainly stirs up strong feelings around here, though we are just as passionate about The Ultimatum, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, and Fboy Island—and we’re still mad at WB Discovery for canceling it.

RuPaul’s Drag Race

The modern laws of television require that not more than two weeks pass without a new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race or one of its spinoffs airing. We’re nothing if law-abiding pop-culture writers, and we’ve responded with coverage as exhaustive as the incessant episodes are exhausting. Still, we’d be lying if we didn’t say that all it takes is one epic Lip Sync for Your Life to get us back on board.

Succession

The Roys may not have been serious people, but we treated them as such. It’s rare that something you really want to be amazing delivers on all of those hopes, in the way that Succession’s final season did. It’s been almost three months since the finale aired, and we could still monologue about so many things that happened: Tom and Shiv’s relationship, the election plot, Gerri and Roman’s fight, the biting, Connor’s wedding, the funeral, and, most of all, Sarah Snook’s unbelievable acting.

The White Lotus

If we’re being honest, we’re all spending the summer resentful that we’re not in Italy engaged in psychosexual mind games with some of the hottest people ever on TV, gallivanting with (possibly murderous) high-end gays, and unapologetically wearing some of the ugliest clothes you’ve ever seen while having a fling with a guy who also bangs his “uncle”. Only The White Lotus could make that seem so appealing.

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