MILES PARKS, HOST:
'Tis the season for lists - you know, best films of the year, best TV shows, best albums. I love a list as much as the next guy. But what about the other side of the coin - the cringe, the derivative, the things that were just extraordinarily bad. Can we learn anything from thinking about the worst things that we watched this year? For that, let's bring in Joanna Robinson. She's a cultural critic and podcaster at The Ringer. Joanna Robinson, I want to apologize, just to start, for making you relive some of these moments with me.
JOANNA ROBINSON: Oh, what an honor to sort of marinate in the mediocre here at the end of the year with you.
PARKS: (Laughter) So we asked you to put together a list of the sort of worst things you watched this year, but this is also not the first time that you've done it. So I'm curious about how you think of it more broadly, like, when you think of the worst things. Can you talk us through that?
ROBINSON: Yeah, this is a list I've made for a couple of years now, and it's getting harder and harder to make this list not because things are getting better, but because when you make a list like this, you want it to be something that everyone's seen, so that when you talk about it, everyone goes, oh, yes, that was bad. I do remember that. And that's just harder and harder to do as people are watching fewer and fewer things all at the same time.
PARKS: Well, so without further ado, let's start with film. My understanding is that our first movie involves something involving a sex cardigan, but I do not know what we're talking about here.
ROBINSON: Oh, exciting. How delightful that I get to introduce you to the concept of the sex cardigan. This is "Wicked: For Good," a movie that definitely a ton of people saw of all ages and based, of course, on the very popular stage play. And for fans of the stage play, the musical, they know that in Act 2 of that musical, there's this delightful, slow, sexy jam, is-this-OK-for-kids-to-be-watching, we're-not-sure moment. And your characters are supposed to be sort of full of passion. They've run away together. What is going to happen?
And in the film version of this story, our lead character, played by beautiful Cynthia Erivo, puts on the most frumpy, did-the-flying-monkeys-knit-this-with-their-fingers, frumpy, frumpy sex cardigan. And it just stopped the film in its tracks. Like, absolutely everyone in my theater sort of went, what is - what's happening right now?
PARKS: I feel like it's hard to make the second act of "Wicked" worse...
ROBINSON: Right.
PARKS: ...Than it already is, but somehow it sounds like they did it.
ROBINSON: Harder to watch - Cynthia Erivo had to comment on the cardigan. The costume designer who won an Oscar for the first film had to comment on the cardigan. Like, this became an absolute internet sensation. And it was just a baffling choice. We should be taking clothes off during a sex jam, not putting layers on.
PARKS: Yeah, OK. So they'll take notes. If there's ever a "Wicked: Part 3"...
ROBINSON: Right.
PARKS: ...Hopefully they figure that out, but...
ROBINSON: No knitwear. That's what I would say.
PARKS: No knitwear. Fair enough. All right. What's next? What else did you bring us?
ROBINSON: Well, it was a tough year, I would say, for Marvel Studios, and it's been a tough couple of years for Marvel Studios. But there was something that Marvel had. It cast a spell on us. They were excellent movies in their first decade-plus. And you could see actors like the late, great Robert Redford show up and talk about infinity stones and tesseracts, and you bought in. It all made sense.
And then this year, they brought us "Captain America: Brave New World," and Harrison Ford is here to play our president who is also a rage monster, Red Hulk. And they've just lost their ability to tell a coherent story such that you could not believe that Harrison Ford was running around among the cherry blossom trees of Washington, D.C., screaming and punching things. And it was just a tough intro to Marvel this year.
PARKS: Before we let you go, I want to hear a little bit about your TV takes as well because I will say, it feels like TV's even a higher-risk proposition. I feel like a bad movie, you waste 2 hours. But a bad TV show can, like, ruin your week. So do you have anything that people should avoid binging this holiday season?
ROBINSON: There's a lot of car-crash television this year because of that fractured viewership that we were talking about. It is harder and harder for streamers and studios to get people to watch anything. And there's something about, like, there's no such thing as bad press. And something like Kim Kardashian's Hulu show "All's Fair," which cost an obscene $70 million, is one of the worst things that anyone has ever seen. If you just want to have a good time, you can read the reviews of that show.
But what's really interesting to me is that Kim Kardashian, instead of sort of licking her wounds and retreating, kind of embraced this bad press, leaned into it and drove up, I think, by just being a good sport about it, the viewership 'cause people are sort of like, is it as bad as everyone says? And they tuned in, and they found out that it really was, and now Hulu is making a second season. And so I think there's this idea of, if you lean into the bad, there can be that sort of hate-watch enjoyment, too.
PARKS: I love a good life lesson. That, honestly - kind of inspiring, you know?
ROBINSON: Is it? Kim Kardashian out here paving the way for all of us, I guess.
PARKS: That's Joanna Robinson. She's a podcaster and cultural critic at The Ringer. Thank you so much.
ROBINSON: Oh, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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