Josie’s Best of 2025

Another year nearly done! I’ve accomplished almost none of my goals, but maybe I can learn to knit in the next six days. (Probably not.) I did manage to watch a lot of television, so I guess that’s something to brag about.

Best New Television

The second—and, it turns out, last—season of Poker Face was just as good as the first. I reviewed it here, but if you haven’t watched it yet, please start with Season One and dig in for some amazing hair, clothes, and mysteries, all courtesy of the brilliant combo of Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne.

Mythic Quest was new to me in 2025, so I binged all the existing episodes and got to enjoy the last season. It’s technically a workplace sitcom set in a video-game company, but it’s really about the relationship between the two bosses: Charlotte Nicdao as Poppy, the coding genius, and Rob Mac as Ian Grimm, the "ideas guy." Their back-and-forth, surrounded by all sorts of wacky colleagues (including a schemer played by Danny Pudi, who was Abed in Community) is both hilarious and often very touching. Sometimes inappropriate touching.

Unlike the previous two, Pluribus is just getting started: I watched the season finale just an hour before writing up this Best Of list. Vince Gilligan’s latest show follows the misadventures of Carol, a curmudgeonly romantasy writer who is one of only 12 people in the world who haven’t been infected with a hivemind happiness virus. I’m going to review the season soon, so you’ve got just enough time to renew that AppleTV subscription and catch up on all nine episodes.

Best Old Television

I quit Black Mirror a few years ago, after that one episode with the pedophile. The darkness of the show, and its willingness to manipulate the audience with the goal of asking “hard what-if” questions started to seem more edgelord than edgy. But I decided to try again, and wound up catching up on all the episodes I’d missed.

The newest seasons are still bleak, but they’re oddly less nihilistic than previous seasons. Charlie Booker, the creator and showrunner, said somewhere that once reality started to seem like a Black Mirror episode he wanted to tweak the tone a bit, and the result is oddly pleasing and shockingly less shocking.

The Lazarus Project, a little two-season British show that follows a wacky Groundhog Day scenario to all of its logical and implausible conclusions, was completely absorbing. It’s hilarious, timey-wimey, lovely to look at. But its greatest strength is the complexity of the characters and their interactions: every bad decision feels narratively earned.

For years, American sewists have wanted legal access to just one thing: The Great British Sewing Bee. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a sewing version of The Great British Bake Off. I binged all eleven seasons (the Brits are still withholding the twelfth, probably to punish us for tariffs). It’s charming, heartwarming, educational, and I miss it so much.

Best Movies

I didn’t watch many movies this year, but three stood out: Flow, an animated feature about a plucky black cat who creates a found family in the middle of an apocalypse; Sinners, which had the most amazing musical scene in the middle of what was already an incredible film; and One Battle After Another, a Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that I thought I’d hate but wound up loving. Special shout-out to An Honest Fangirl and Logan Cox. Without their reviews I never would have tried either of those films.

Best Books

HG Parry’s The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is, I guess, a dark academia magic university novel. But it’s really, really good and not silly at all. The adventures of the “Camford” magical scholars are fascinating, and Parry does a wonderful job of creating a strong sense of both place and vibes.

Lief Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is almost impossible to explain: it’s definitely a “you just have to read it” book that succeeds at tone and vibes more than anything quantifiable. Technically, it’s set in a near-future upper Midwest, in which environmental disaster and corporate/military overreach have created a world in which the best way to thrive is to lay low, focusing on solving small problems in small towns. When tragedy disrupts the tiny, pleasant life that Rainy and Lark have made for themselves, Rainy goes on a variety of adventures across Lake Superior.

All of that sounds vague and more than a little depressing, but this book is, somehow, heartwarming about the potential for minor joys and endless, basic compassion in the world. I loved it so much that I’m making a pillowcase with a quote from the book: “Refuse Apocalypse in all its forms, and work cheerfully against it.” I’m slow at cross stitch, though, so I only have this so far:

I really should hide this until it's done.

Speaking of things in progress: in last December 2024, I read this article by the writer and critic Brandon Taylor, about his multi-year adventure trying to read all twenty of Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels about an extended family living at all levels of Second Empire France. In that essay, Taylor admits that he thought he could accomplish that goal in six months, but it took him two years. What got me hooked, though, was one of his lines towards the end: “You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us.”

I responded to that, of course, with the words “Challenge Accepted!” Determined to outpace Taylor, I was going to read all twenty novels in ten months. (Six did seem ambitious.) But two a month surely was a manageable goal, right?

No. I marched bravely through the first eight or so, and then began to slow down. Zola is a very, very good writer, but he is not a great one, and his pacing is clockwork-precise. Normally, that’s a delight. But reading one Zola after another made me feel like I’d just binged a hundred hours of an old sitcom, where the punchlines land at the same minute-mark and the laugh track reminds me of how I’m supposed to react.

I currently have ten more Zolas to read, and I will finish this goal in 2026 even if it destroys my brain. So that’s something you can all look forward to reading about in 365 days.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)