I Have Friends Everywhere
City Chicken presents 2025 Faves!
Hello, City Chicken tenders! Welcome to my annual year-end wrap-up. Last week in The New Republic, I wrote an essay about 2025 in TV, spotlighting some of my favorite shows and thinking back over a year when everybody was walking around crying, blasting their leafblowers on the max setting, and shouting CRISIS OF MASCULINITY at the top of their lungs. My year-end essay offers some counter-programming. You should please read that by clicking on this sentence.
But I didn’t have room in that essay to include my full top ten. So, that’s what this missive is for. Plus a few other annotated lists of TV things I liked, as well as my favorite books and essays of 2025. I’ll have new newsletters for you in the new year. I’ll also finish my book sometime in the summer, and then start to get real annoying about you all pre-ordering it in the winter. Meantime, thanks for reading here and everywhere else — it really, truly means a lot.
BEST NEW THINGS I SAW ON TV IN 2025
Dying for Sex (FX) // I’ve said it before, but the saddest show of the year also managed to be the funniest.
Andor (Disney+) // It’s both unimaginable that a series like this got made in the current craven and short-sighted streaming landscape, but it also feels like the kind of show that could only ever have been Trojan Horsed into a streaming landscape this craven and short-sighted. One of the most risk-averse streamers in the biz somehow greenlit a show that’s just four separate The Wires playing simultaneously like Zaireeka.
Long Story Short (Netflix) // I can’t talk about it enough. There’s a very funny running gag throughout the entirety of this animated family dramedy that pays off in such a devastating way in the finale that I literally couldn’t believe they’d pulled it.
The Rehearsal (HBO) // Nathan Fielder has, traditionally, been very much Not For Me, but his tragicomic journey into the dark heart of the airline industry was so precisely my shit it’s like he knew I was watching. That couldn’t possibly be true, but even imaginary micro-targeting works sometimes.
The Pitt (HBO Max) // This disgusting, delightful show used its blood magic to resurrect Television in 2025.
Mo (Netflix) // Mo is one of the most relentlessly charming shows of the 2020s, and it’s leveraged that superpower to tell an urgent, gut-wrenching, life-affirming story about immigration and about Palestine. Its final episode, set in the West Bank, is almost unspeakably moving.
The Chair Company (HBO) // The trick of a Tim Robinson sketch is that sometimes you end up caring about the moron at the center of it. This is that at scale.
Task (HBO) // It bears repeating: in a year of shows that were trying to Say Something about men and masculinity, this show said the most the best. Plus, Tom Pelphrey is a star, possibly only in roles with convincing Delco accents.
Unrivaled (TNT) // I love the WNBA, but the absolute best women’s basketball TV product this year was Unrivaled, the offseason three-on-three league founded by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier (its second season begins in just a couple weeks). Behold the spectacle of extremely charismatic athletes getting paid what they deserve. Everybody watches women’s sports.
Too Much (Netflix) // Lena Dunham back.
Honorable mention: this bootleg video of Cynthia Erivo playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. Listen, surely I’ve exceeded expectations.
BEST TV PERFORMANCES OF 2025 (ANY SIZE)
Tom Pelphrey // Task :: Elizabeth Dulau // Andor :: Aimee Lou Wood // The White Lotus
Janicza Bravo // Too Much :: Taylor Dearden // The Pitt :: Farah Bsaiso // Mo
Rose Byrne // Platonic :: James Acaster // Late Night w/ Seth Meyers :: Esco Jouley // Dying for Sex :: Lisa Edelstein // Long Story Short (not pictured) (because she’s a cartoon)
BEST NEW BOOKS I READ (I ONLY READ NON-FICTION BOOKS THIS YEAR, SORRY)
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age // Amanda Hess
Second Life is a really funny and moving memoir and a really serious work of criticism. But I keep coming back to it because Hess displays so much sentence-by-sentence care as a writer I can hardly believe it. The writing in a book on this topic — and I’ve now read many! — does not need to be this thoughtfully textured, this punchily lyrical. And yet. I read this shortly after I started the process of my own book, and I keep it on my nightstand to dip into again every once in a while, truly, practically, as an inspiration. The rule is: no uninteresting sentences. If you are now or were ever expecting, or if you just want to read an unusually perceptive memoir of millennial life, this is the book.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves // Sophie Gilbert
This is one of two excellent books this year about late 90s/early aughts pop culture (including Colette Shade’s delightful and unnerving collection of essays, Y2K). Something I really admire about Gilbert’s writing here is that she’s able to dexterously manage this extremely wide archive of pop cultural texts and examples without falling into showboating. When she cites a half dozen movies within a single paragraph, it’s not for the performance of cultural fluency, it’s for the sake of her argument. Anyway, it’s a super-compelling narrative of turn of the century misogyny, a massive task done in the most aerodynamic form.
Reasons & Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now // Sarah Mesle
This one’s cheating a bit because Sarah and I are friends and collaborators, and I read a lot of it before it was a book, and I heard Sarah tell me a lot of it back when it was just extremely good editorial advice delivered to someone she was editing, but, man, this book is good. In addition to being a book full of very good writing advice for academics and non-academics alike, it’s one of very few books I’ve read that tries to account for the blog era of the internet as a kind of literary period, when — just as in any literary period — new forms of writing evolved and exploded and changed what it means to write an essay or an article or what it means to have a voice in writing. The sell here is not that you’re getting access to excellent pointers — though you are! — it’s that you’re getting access to Sarah Mesle.
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman // Niko Stratis
Wow, this book. Structured as a series of short essays intertwining the narrative(s) of her transition with incredible critical vignettes about various dad rock anthems, new and established, this is a real feat. You’re going to love the writing, and you’re going to hear each of these songs in a totally different way. When I look at the book page on bookshop, it’s just covered in the word “tender,” and I understand why.
The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History // Maggie Gram
In addition to being exactly the sort of Compelling History of a Thing that Doesn’t Seem Like it Has a History I most love, Maggie Gram’s book is also such a terrific model of what a really robustly researched book can look like when a writer knows how to handle her sources with care and a light touch. One of the breeziest works of pop scholarship you’ll read.
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
This is a long, incomplete list of essays that inspired me this year, starting with an essay about school…
“Who’s Afraid of Public Schools?” // Momspreading // Sarah Wheeler
Some essays about masculinity…
“When ‘Authenticity’ Means ‘Dudes’” // Very Professional Journalizing // Danielle Kurtzleben
“Fatherhood” // A Smoke Filled Lounge // Mychal Denzel Smith
“What Did Men Do to Deserve This?” // New Yorker // Jessica Winter
Some essays about masculinity and basketball…
“Joel Embiid Sees You” // ESPN // Dotun Akintoye
“A Closed Loop” // Basketball Feelings // Katie Heindl
“Toward a Unified Theory of Uncool” // Never Hungover // Ock Sportello
Two essays from Defector…
“The Floodwaters are Rising” // Defector // Kelsey McKinney
“The United States of Snitches” // Defector // David Roth
Two essays about the Charlie Kirk Affair…
“Charlie Kirk, Redeemed” // Vanity Fair // Ta-Nehisi Coates
“How Can We Live Together?” // Boston Review // Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
An essay about why we need reviews and a review that we absolutely need…
“In Defense of the Traditional Review” // New Yorker // Richard Brody
“That Shape Am I” // London Review of Books // Patricia Lockwood
Two essays about Solutions that are actually Problems…
“The Tech Fantasy that Powers AI is Running on Fumes” // NYT // Tressie McMillan Cottom
“Pronatalism Isn’t a Solution, It’s a Problem” // New York // Sarah Jones
Four really good pieces of media criticism The Way We Live Now…
“Zola, Anora, and the DEI Mirage” // RogerEbert // Danielle Scruggs
“The Radical Cringe of The Pitt” // Los Angeles Review of Books // Charlotte Rosen
“Warped Ways of Seeing P.O.V.” // New Yorker // Lauren Michele Jackson
An essay about how everybody kept telling the editors of Science that they should use ChatGPT to write their news briefs, so Science spent two years doing a study about whether or not it could be useful, and it turned out it wasn’t, so they won’t…
“Can ChatGPT Help Science Writers?” // Science // Abigail Eisenstadt
An essay about what it sounds like it’s about…
“What the Fuck Are We Even Doing Anymore?” // The Late Review // Kate Wagner
And the recipe for what I made for dinner last night…
“Slow-Roasted Salmon with Kale, Chickpeas, and Fried Lemons”
Everything’s alright, yes, everything’s fine,
Phil.
This is great — happy new year!