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For the first time in nearly two weeks, Jimmy Butler suited up for the Miami Heat on Wednesday against the New Orleans Pelicans. Of course, a lot has happened in that time, as a report came out that Butler would prefer the Heat move him before the trade deadline, while Pat Riley has made clear that he has no intention of trading his All-Star wing who can hit unrestricted free agency this summer.

Butler has never been shy about his willingness to force his way out of a place when he believes his time is up there, while the Heat are known as some of the toughest negotiators in the NBA. As such, it’s very easy to wonder if something was up with his return from an illness, as Butler was taken out of the game with 3:29 left in the third quarter and did not return. After the game, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra addressed this, and after expressing that it had nothing to do with Miami being on a back-to-back, said that it was exclusively because of his absence.

“Thirteen days is a long time away, and I just went with the group there in the fourth that was getting us the most, and to see if that group could close it out,” Spoelstra said.

Butler played 25 minutes on Wednesday night, going for nine points, four rebounds, and two assists on 3-for-5 shooting from the field. This was one of his two misses. Miami went on to win the game, 119-108, behind 32 points from Tyler Herro and 23 points, 10 assists, nine rebounds, and three steals by Bam Adebayo.

The Detroit Pistons have taken a step forward this year, going from one of the league’s worst teams to a Play-In contender in the Eastern Conference through the first third of the season. As the calendar turns to 2025, there is optimism in Detroit about the way the team is trending, as they seem to be building a solid core.

Cade Cunningham headlines that group, but Jaden Ivey has emerged as a quality backcourt mate for Cunningham, averaging 17.4 points per game this season on career-best efficiency (45.3 percent shooting overall and 39.2 percent from three). On Wednesday against the Magic, Ivey was having a sensational night, scoring 22 points on 8-of-11 shooting before disaster struck when Orlando guard Cole Anthony dove for a loose ball and crashed into Ivey, rolling up his left leg in a gruesome injury (video here, but warning it is graphic).

Ivey was on the floor for some time surrounded by players from both teams while being attended to by the medical staff and was eventually taken off the court on a stretcher, with towels over his injured leg. Anthony was extremely emotional on the court after what was a freak accident when he was just trying to go for the ball that led to what appeared to be a serious injury for the young Pistons guard. Hopefully Ivey will be able to make a full recovery and pick up where he left off this season whenever he is able to return to the court.

New Year’s in New Orleans is one of the biggest celebrations in America. New Orleans is already one of the most vibrant cities in the country, and when you add in a Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day with 80,000+ college football fans coming into town, it gets even bigger.

However, tragedy struck the celebration in New Orleans at the start of 2025 when a man drove a truck through the crowd on Bourbon Street in the early hours of Wednesday morning, killing at least 15 and injuring dozens more. The suspect was killed in a subsequent standoff with police, and the FBI is investigating it as a terrorist attack. That investigation is ongoing and has resulted in the FBI and police doing sweeps of Bourbon Street, the Caesars Superdome, and other highly-trafficked areas, looking to ensure the tragic events of Wednesday morning remained an isolated incident.

The ongoing investigation meant a decision needed to be made on Wednesday afternoon about how they would proceed with the Sugar Bowl, scheduled for Wednesday night at 7:45 p.m. local time between Notre Dame and Georgia. After initially planning on moving forward with the game as scheduled, Sugar Bowl officials met with law enforcement officials on Wednesday and determined the best course of action was to postpone the game, per ABC News. The current plan is to play the game on Thursday, with the game currently being pushed back 24 hours until Thursday.

District Attorney of Orleans Parish Jason Williams told ABC News that the game will be played on Thursday instead of Wednesday night.

“As of right now, it’s only being postponed one day,” Williams said.

As Laura Rutlege of ESPN reported on ABC News, Georgia’s football team has a shelter-in-place order at their hotel and the FBI did a sweep earlier in the day on the Superdome that came back clear to allow people back into the building.

Unlike the high-profile recruitment of his older brother, Bryce James hasn’t received a ton of attention as he tries to figure out where he’s going to play his college ball. And yet, on Wednesday afternoon, the younger son of LeBron and Savannah James announced on his Instagram account that he’s headed to Tuscon to suit up for Tommy Lloyd and the Arizona Wildcats.

According to Jason Scheer of WildcatAuthority.com, James — who 247Sports received an offer from the program on New Year’s Eve — was drawn to Arizona because of “Tommy Lloyd’s ability to develop players and his patience with that process.” On3’s industry ranking has the 6’4 James as a three-star recruit and the number 204 overall player in America.

James plays his high school ball at Sierra Canyon, which was the school that his brother, Bronny, attended before he went to USC. Bronny spent a year with the Trojans before entering the NBA Draft, getting selected by the Los Angeles Lakers, and suiting up alongside his dad. As for whether Bryce, who will not be eligible to enter the league until the 2026 NBA Draft at the earliest, can replicate that remains to be seen, but when he was asked about this recently, he seemed skeptical that LeBron will still be in the league by the time he’s ready to play professionally.

Back when Apple TV+ launched in 2019, nobody could have predicted that the tech giant would soon win the original sci-fi series streaming game. Foundation, Silo, Severance, and Invasion have helped cement this streamer’s reputation, and the granddaddy of them all, For All Mankind, is still kicking. The alternate space-race-history series is gearing up for a fifth season while a spin off, Star City, is preparing to tell the Russian-cosmonauts side of the story.

How long can For All Mankind realistically last? Co-creator Matt Wolpert told Den Of Geek that he (along with co-creators Ronald D. Moore and Ben Nedivi) initially planned for seven seasons, and they’re sticking with it. Apple TV+ announced the fifth season with a declaration that “The future is written in the stars,” so let’s talk about what we can expect from the next leap for mankind.

Plot

Since each For All Mankind season leaps about a decade into the future, viewers will not be surprised to learn that this remains the M.O. That gives plenty of cooling off time between the asteroid heist plan conceived by Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) and agreed to by Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), and we are also worlds away from the series launching point of 1969 when the Soviet Union beat the U.S. to the Moon. What is certain, however, is that the show will quickly dive into a montage to review what has transpired (after the fourth season’s expansion on Mars) in the most recent decade when the story picks up in 2012, although valid questions remain on whether Ed remains onboard with Happy Valley (or is even alive) following his visibly declining health.

Ben Nedivi told Slashfilm that the montage-making process is as “hellish” as it seems, and although Apple TV+ has been quiet about the forthcoming plot, there is (as mentioned) a seven-season plan. The co-creators conceded to Variety that we might see some legacy characters begin to retire. At this time, no concrete hints point toward Ed Baldwin heading toward the Martian sunset, but we might have seen the last of Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) following her imprisonment, and Dani (Krys Marshall) miraculously landed back on earth with Marshall previously telling Entertainment Weekly that she had no clue whether her character was done with the series.

Rest assured that Mars will very much remain a setting in the fifth season, as revealed by Deadline’s casting news for new characters on the red planet. As expected, though, fifth-season secrecy has permeated every bit of press from the show’s creatives, but Matt Wolpert did tell Variety that the fourth-season asteroid heist by Dev will not be forgotten when the series picks up:

“Dev felt like the right character, because from the beginning of his introduction on the show, he has had this vision of what the space program could be, and specifically what life on Mars could be. He’s starting to see his vision come to fruition at the end of this season, so it felt like both showing him be content with what’s done to this point, and still looking to the future of what’s next. In terms of the asteroid, it is mining equipment you see, but let’s just say it will definitely play a role in Season 5 in a way we can’t quite say yet.”

In addition to the near silence on a plot synopsis for this fifth season, Apple TV+ hasn’t disclosed whether Star City will launch in between For All Mankind seasons, although since franchise creators want to continue for at least three more seasons of the Kinnaman-starring show, timing overlap seems likely.

Cast

Series creatives haven’t revealed whether returning Joel Kinnaman will be accompanied back to the aging-makeup chair by Wrenn Schmidt, Edi Gathegi, Cynthy Wu, Coral Peña, Krys Marshall, Tyner Rushing, Daniel Stern, Toby Kebbell, and/or Svetlana Efremova.

New series regulars include Mireille Enos and Costa Ronin along with Sean Kaufman as Alex Poletov Baldwin, grandson of Kinnaman’s Ed Baldwin. Ruby Cruz is onboard as Lily Dale, and Ines Asserson will portray U.S. Marine A.J. Jarrett, who’s gearing up for a space mission. Additionally, Barrett Carnahan (recently seen as Young Kreese in Cobra Kai) will portray “‘Marcus,’ a recent high school graduate living on Mars).”

Release Date

Apple TV+ announced the fifth season in April 2024, and the series has generally returned after less than two years

Trailer

No trailer, but the DMX needle drop after the below “Do you want to help me steal an asteroid?” line can go hard enough for now.

Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman had the longest of mistiest paths to becoming a TV show, three decades after the DC Vertigo comic’s debut. The hesitation was down to the fantasy author resisting several awful movie attempts, and too much could have gone wrong in adapting the infinitely layered fantasy story, but Netflix brought a lugubrious and stunning spectacle to life, full of Life Amid Death as the first three graphic novels were initially adapted.

The second season has taken years to come together, which isn’t unheard of for a Netflix fantasy series with heavy VFX. Sadly, however, this could also conceivably be the final season, given that several Gaiman projects (like Amazon’s Good Omens) have been cut short, cancelled, or apparently indefinitely paused in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against the author (as initially reported by Tortoise Media). Those accusations do make the show’s bonus “Calliope” story hit differently than when the episode first surfaced, but The Sandman‘s second season is still coming, so let’s (awkwardly) sift through what we can expect.

Plot

No doubt, the lead-up to this second season has been handled differently than the show’s debut, given a hard-to-ignore backburnering of Gaiman, who was previously front and center in Netflix’s behind-the-scene looks and not even mentioned in featurette counterparts, which instead now have showrunner Allan Heinberg in the spotlight. In the below Netflix video, star Tom Sturridge has revealed that Morpheus/Dream is now cleaning up the mess that he has created, “the consequences of which are enormous,” and which place him “in a place of rebuilding.” Heinberg adds that Dream “has reclaimed his stolen tools and missing dreams, and is now focused on rebuilding his realm and attending to his duties,” but “the sins of his past [will] catch up with him and make that impossible.”

How many episodes will we see? The first season brought 10 initial episodes and a bonus hour, but Netflix has not offered a count for the second season. However, Redanian Intelligence has passed on the rumor that we could see 12 new episodes of The Sandman when the show returns. This seems too good to be true, so we will await official word on that note, but the second season will leap headlong into Season Of Mists, the fourth graphic novel (that is considered the favorite volume of many The Sandman fans). Among countless other threads, Morpheus will go head-to-head again with Gwendoline Christie’s Lucifer, who will be Hell-bent upon revenge, but Dream also has much personal business, long after he condemned his lover, Nada, to Hell.

These reported episode titles reflect much fire and brimstone:

– “The Song of Orpheus”
– “More Devils Than Vast Hell Can Hold”
– “Brief Lives”
– “Family Blood”
– “The Ruler of Hell”
– “Season of Mists”

In addition to plenty of Lucifer, a family dinner will being The Endless fully together with more siblings including Esmé Creed-Miles as Delirium, Adrian Lester as Destiny, and Barry Sloane as “The Prodigal”/Destruction. We will also meet Clive Russell as Odin and Freddie Fox as Loki.

Also, the once-hypothesized Johanna Constantine spin off is surely off the table, but Jenna Coleman did tell Screenrant that her character is back. She added that the already gorgeous series will be “probably more visually stunning than it was the first year,” and that the scale of the series has grown. From that statement, we can assume that, as Gaiman previously disclosed, this is has remained a very expensive series to produce.

That detail doesn’t bode well for a third season to dive further into the The Sandman‘s ten graphic novels, especially given the troubled status of other Gaiman adaptations. For that to happen, viewership would need to be huge.

Cast

Returning members of the Endless include Dream/Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), and Despair (Donna Preston). New siblings include Esmé Creed-Miles as Delirium, Adrian Lester as Destiny, and Barry Sloane as “The Prodigal”/Destruction. As noted already, Gwendoline Christie will reprise Lucifer, and Jenna Coleman will return as Johanna Constantine.

New characters will include Orpheus, son of Dream (Ruairi O’Connor), Puck (Jack Gleeson), Wanda (Indya Moore), Nuala (Ann Skelly), Loki (Freddie Fox), Odin (Clive Russell), and Cluracan (Douglas Booth).

In the voice acting realm, Patton Oswalt will be back as Matthew the Raven, and he will be joined by Steve Coogan as Barnabas the dog.

Release Date

Netflix hasn’t pinpointed a release date yet but committed to The Sandman gracing dreams again in 2025.

Trailer

Without a proper trailer, the suggestion is that the series won’t return until at least summer, but if you did miss the bonus episode with “A Dream Of A Thousand Cats,” this episode previews that story as well as “Calliope.”

Black Doves might be the perfect streaming spy series. That’s a sweeping statement amid a sea of streaming spy shows, but I’m sticking to it. The Keira Knightly and Ben Whishaw-starring series features inexplicably likable characters despite the awful things that they do. The story is John Wick-like with a cozy holiday backdrop and no amount of schmaltz. The action is well choreographed and the comedy black. And perhaps most importantly, the six-episode first season is tightly paced and sharply written.

Did the season leave viewers wanting more? Well yes, but also, the season did not contain a second of wasted time. No superfluous side stories surfaced, and the season still managed to flesh out full-fledged and rounded characters and backstories amid martial arts and gunfire. Viewers could take comfort in knowing that a second season had already been announced, so Helen and Sam’s best-friend dynamic would continue onscreen. Yet a natural question exists, which is whether the next season will be of longer duration.

How Many Episodes Will Be In Black Doves Season 2?

Netflix hasn’t officially spoken on the subject, but it’s important to note that the series was publicized on the streamer’s social media accounts as “a six-episode spy thriller.” This could have been a preemptive measure, so that people wouldn’t expect an eight or ten episode season and feel disappointed after six hours of viewing time. That element of surprise was a leading reason why The Diplomat fans were so upset when the Keri Russell series dropped a second season cliffhanger after six episodes when the first season held eight. Amid that backlash, showrunner Deborah Cohn revealed that the next season would be eight episodes long.

Whereas Black Doves was very upfront about a six-episode structure going into the first season, so it’s likely safe to assume that this is the same plan for the future. And sure, a slight bit of obligatory grousing about six episodes did happen on social media, but the overwhelming sentiment is that Helen and Sam’s spy-assassin pairing was perfectly packaged, and they’re looking forward to more. Communication rules, and these gloriously messy characters cannot return soon enough.

Black Doves‘ first season is streaming on Netflix.

Nobody can predict for sure what reality will being next year (especially considering current events), but there will be one certainty: plenty of new TV will be coming along with accompanying reasons to sit down and escape into another world. The streaming services will be running hot while the temps are frigid, so here are the must-see shows for January:

The Night Agent: Season 2 (Netflix series 1/23)

Is Peter outta the basement for good? Presumably so, but he still has to earn his stripes in the Night Action program, which will take him abroad to Thailand. This season, he and Rose will find themselves dodging an intelligence broker, although Netflix hasn’t revealed whether they’ll mostly do so from different continents. Still, there should be enough goodwill from Peter helping save the president’s life to let him hang with Rose in person for more than one scene. You know, so nobody gets upset at a lack of Gabriel Basso shirtlessness.

The Couple Next Door: Season 1 (Starz series debuting 1/17)

Immediately after the latest Outlander season concludes, Starz will launch the next series starring Sam Heughan, and no kilts will be involved unless they’re hiding them from previews. He will portray a hot cop who lives in suburbia where neighbors get a little too personal. After curtains flutter aplenty, infidelity starts floating around in heads, and of course, a thriller series cannot let that stone go unturned. Before long, lives become sexually entangled in a way that will change two couples’ lives forever [cue dramatic music].

Severance: Season 2 (Apple TV+ series debuting 1/17)

The “work-life balance” satire will return after three years away, so hopefully, that wait will have been worth the sci-fi that will unfold. Creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller will bring back the core four (Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan) so that Milchick can continue to terrorize them while the mystery of Mark’s wife continues to unfold. These whistleblowers are now “The Face of Severance Reform,” although the ominous environment will give way to a snowy retreat and more goats. Ms. Cobel still seems sinister as hell, and Gwendoline Christie portrays a truly frightening looking character. It’s enough to make everybody want to call in sick, whether Innie or Outie.

American Primeval (Netflix limited series 1/9)

Creative minds behind Friday Night Lights, Narcos, and The Revenant have come together for this Neo-Western limited series in which Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin go through hell on earth. The year is 1857, and they’re fighting through frigid elements amid the Mountain Meadows Massacre, during which Mormon soldiers killed hundreds of pioneers at the behest of Brigham Young. This clash involves Indigenous nationals also rising up to fight for their own survival within the same contested territory, and this ain’t Yellowstone, but there’s no question that Netflix wants to capture a piece of that pie with this series and the upcoming The Abandons.

Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches: Season 2 (AMC series debuting 1/5)

AMC’s other Anne Rice series will return with Alexandra Daddario’s Rowan Mayfair having given birth to a demon, and now, she’s got to sort out the supernatural mess. He might be a monster or a healer, but ultimately, Rowan must do what’s possible to keep her family safe. This isn’t as free-wheeling of a series as Interview with the Vampire, which should return later in the year.

On Call: Season 1 (Prime Video/Amazon series debuting 1/9)

The cinema verité effect meets police drama in this series starring Troian Bellisario and Brandon Larracuente along with Eriq La Salle, Lori Loughlin, and Rich Ting. The show, according to Deadline, “explores the morality of protecting and serving a community” with veteran officers and rookies coming together in a half hour series that mixes challenges facing contemporary law enforcement with a variety of footage sources, including body cams. The tone will be a serious one, and this ain’t 9-1-1, y’all.

The Pitt: Season 1 (Max series debuting 1/9)

More first responder-types will light primetime up while putting former ER star Noah Wyle back in scrubs for a dramatized series that will attempt to tackle a real-time hour in each episode. The end result aims for realism surrounding what healthcare workers must face on a daily basis as Wyle’s Dr. Robby helms the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital’s emergency department. This looks stressful as hell but also like undeniably captivating viewing material.

Prime Target: Season 1 (Apple TV+ series debuting 1/22)

The White Lotus bad boy and One Day lover dude dives into conspiracy-thriller land as a mathematical genius who might have cracked the code that can control every computer on Earth. This does not sound malignant at all, and he will soon find himself under the observation of an NSA agent portrayed by Quintella Swindell. Will they hook up, too? Hollywood usually goes there in thriller mode between two attractive leads, but this is a Ridley Scott production, so do not expect the most straightforward storytelling path.

The Recruit: Season 2 (Netflix series 1/30)

Not to be content with releasing The Night Agent‘s second spy season this month, Netflix is also dropping the show in which Noah Centineo has the worst time as a fledgling CIA lawyer. This year, he’ll be embroiled in a South Korean espionage scandal, and as a series description reveals, “the bigger threat just might be coming from inside the Agency.” This might come only as a surprise to Noah Centineo’s CIA lawyer himself, and ideally, the show will include followup on whether Max will live or die after her daughter pulled the trigger.

IMDb’s “Top 250 TV Shows” list, as voted on by the website’s users, is a useful metric at what’s considered the “best” that television has to offer. The ranking is topped by Breaking Bad, followed by two installments of the BBC’s Planet Earth miniseries and three HBO programs (Band of Brothers, Chernobyl, and The Wire). There’s actually only one still-active series in the top 15: Bluey.

In an equally impressive achievement, the Disney+ animated series from creator Joe Brumm is also the most-streamed show of 2024 (and the most delightful). That’s according to The Hollywood Reporter, which called Bluey the year’s “streaming champion” and noted that it will come close to matching the minutes-viewed record set by Suits in 2023.

Bluey has “amassed more than 50 billion minutes of streaming time on Disney+” this year alone. That’s around 95,000 years! It’s been in the top-10 of Nielsen’s streaming list since October 2022, and “currently holds a roughly 7 billion-minute lead for this year over Grey’s Anatomy.”

It’s tough to compare cable/broadcast vs. streaming numbers, but it seems safe to call Bluey the most-watched TV show of 2024. Even bigger than the record ratings for the final season of Yellowstone. Maybe that’s the real reason Kevin Costner left: he wanted to take over as the new voice of Bandit.

2024 is coming to a close — which means it’s time to look back at all the big online moments that helped define the year. We’re talking about the happenings, trends, and jokes that resonated with us most. This stuff crossed cultural and ideological lines, amusing or annoying us to no end.

In other words, we’re talking about memes. Defining a meme used to be much easier, but now that we’re dealing with a household word that even your grandma knows, we feel the term meme is a much larger umbrella than, say, five years ago when a meme was a simple joke image or GIF passed around on social media sites amongst terminally online people. These days it feels like modern life itself is a meme.

I suppose the best we can do is let the memes themselves define what memes are. So here is 2024’s year in memes. Our favorite, the funniest, and for better or worse, the most pervasive. These were the memes we found inescapable in this very very strange year on Earth.

Emotionally Unloading On Elmo

Social media has led to all sorts of weird marketing moves, like those fast food social accounts that have built a following from being snarky and rude to each other. And then there is Elmo. A wholesome, bastion of optimism and empathy. What happens when you subject such a thing to the internet? Shit gets weird.

At the start of this year Elmo posed a simple question on X: “Elmo is checking in! How is everybody doing?” to which countless X accounts emotionally unloaded on the Muppet, causing the official Sesame Street X account to jump in tweeting: “Thank you, @Elmo, for checking in with reminder for us to pause and take a mindful moment to focus on how we’re feeling.” and then dropped a link to a website about emotional well-being.

It’s safe to say as the calendar turns to 2025, Elmo probably won’t be checking in.

The Willy Wonka Experience

If you could say one thing about this year, it’s that it has felt incredibly long, so it’s easy to forget that the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow — which gave us countless images of what might be the saddest place on earth — happened this same year that we’re currently in.

What better way to represent the disaster that was this “experience,” than the sad Oompa Loompa lady? Through her now iconic image, she telegraphed to the world: “look at this disaster that I’ve been dragged into,” and now as we hit 2025, we’re all feeling the same way.

Tinashe Helps Us Find Our Inner Freaks

Some of the best, most resonant songs are the simplest, and one of the easiest and most universal things to write about is being incredibly horny. Which is why Tinashe’s horned-up anthem “Nasty” had us all singing “I been a nasty girl, nasty, I been a nasty girl, nasty.”

The hook not only became a TikTok go-to for everything from cat videos, to… well… horned-up dances, but the song also gave us the phrase “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” which has become a popular meme template.

Hawk Tuah Girl, Talk Tuah Podcast, And Celebrity In The Year 2024

Haily Welch, aka Hawk Tuah Girl, showed us that the internet celebrity to podcaster to alleged crypto coin scammer pipeline is alive and well! If you don’t know who Hawk Tuah girl is — do you get all your meme news from our end-of-the-year list?— here is the rundown: back in May some YouTubers hit the streets of Nashville talking to bar hoppers and randomly asked Ms. Welch “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” to which she replied, “You gotta give ‘em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang.” And well, the rest is history.

Will Hawk Tuah girl live on in 2025? Probably! Hawk Tuah girl has been quiet since the whole meme-coin controversy, but people love a redemption arc, so don’t write her off just yet.

The Paris Olympics

The summer Paris Olympics were the gift that kept giving for everyone who is terminally online. There was the somehow controversial opening ceremony, which hardcore Christians took as mocking Christianity (it wasn’t), the many memes that grew out of the Olympic shooting event, everyone’s favorite breakdancer Raygun, and oh yeah, and a French pole vaulter lost his event because the pole got caught on his junk.

We could describe to you all the funniest images from the Paris Olympic games in great detail, but can’t for the life of us remember who won what.

Charli XCX’s Brat Summer

kamala IS brat

— Charli (@charli_xcx) July 22, 2024

As a massive Charli XCX fan, this summer’s collective obsession with her felt like a long time coming. Us hardcore Angels have been talking about Charli like this since the singer first linked up with the late producer Sophie, so it was nice to finally have the rest of the world on board.

Not everything about Brat summer panned out. “Kamala Harris is brat,” comes to mind, and we sincerely hope we never have to see another person doing the “Apple Dance,” again, but it also gave us old people on the news trying to figure out what “brat” means, and oh yeah, quite possibly the best album of the year.

Brat’s success also reflected a changing of the guard in modern pop. In 2025, we want less squeaky, clean, highly composed pop stars, ala Taylor Swift, and more messy, genre-pushing, experimental provocateurs like Charli.

”Demure” Is The Internet’s New Favorite Word

If you yourself haven’t used the word “demure,” in the last five months, your younger siblings or cousins have definitely proclaimed something as “very demure, very mindful.” It can all be traced back to TikToker Jools Lebron, a beauty influencer who explained the importance of keeping your work makeup simple.

“see how I do my makeup for work? Very demure, very mindful. I don’t come to work with a green-cut crease. I don’t look like a clown when I go to work.” If I could tell you how or why this term took off, I’d be a very rich person.

Either way, “demure,” was the flip side to Charli XCX’s Brat Summer. If the Brat album cycle was all about unleashing our inner party girl, the demure trend has us all channeling our inner Rory Gilmore.

The Rizzler, A.J. & Big Justice

We could do a whole article devoted to the Rizzler, A.J. & Big Justice — but we won’t because… we really don’t want to. Here is all you need to know about this trio. The Rizzler became an overnight internet sensation after dropping a wholesome video dressed like Black Panther, he does a thing called “The Rizz Face,” and is essentially a mini DJ Khaled. A.J. and Big Justice are a father-son duo who rate Costco foods.

Contrary to popular assumption, the Rizzler is not related to A.J. & Big Justice but has starred in many videos with the duo, including the above “We Bring The Boom (Crew Version),” which is essentially a real-life version of the DK Rap. The internet isn’t known for making celebrities out of wholesome family content, yet this trio exists. There is no edge here, no controversy, just wholesome, family-fun with three undeniable characters.

The Rise Of Moo Deng

The people of the internet are simple people. Give us a video of a cute animal, and that’s all we really need to become obsessed. Case in point: Moo Deng, a pygmy hippopotamus from Thaliand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo, that essentially does what every hippopotamus does. Eats, sleeps, lounges around and acts grumpy — and yet, the internet can’t get enough because she looks f*cking cute doing it.

It has led many to proclaim Moo Deng as “goals.” We all just want to be loved for doing absolutely nothing but living and looking cute while doing it. Moo Deng even made an appearance on SNL’s Weekend Update. Be sure to watch that above.

Megalopolis — “Go Back To The Club”

I mean, where do we even begin with this movie? Megalopolis is a mess. Was it made by one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time? Yes, but a mess is a mess!

We could do a deep dive into everything weird about this movie — and there is plenty — but instead we will leave you with this now iconic scene. This simple 1-minute clip gives you an idea of the whole bizarre tone of this movie.

Megalopolis may not be the masterpiece some had hoped it would be, but at least it has the weirdest line read in the history of cinema in Adam Driver’s “so go back to the club” moment.

The Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Invasion

Sometime in September flyers started appearing around Greenwich Village advertising a Timothée Chalamet look-alike competition with a cash prize of $50. It’s the sort of weirdo sh*t New York used to be known for, so the fact that it existed in the first place was enough to give us joy. What nobody expected is that so many people would show up.

On October 28th, New York’s Washington Square Park, over 2,000 people flooded into the small park with Chalamet lookalikes. Timothée himself even showed up!

As a result of the resounding success, we’ve had several lookalike contests since then, including a Dev Patel version in San Francisco, a Jeremy Allen White competition fittingly in Chicago, and a Glen Powell version in Austin.

When a person vaguely resembles a celebrity, it’s not that strange, but when you see multiple lookalikes in one place at one time, it’s incredibly eerie.

Just A Chilll Guy

Just A Chill Guy feels like an old-fashioned meme. It’s not some big pop cultural moment that is going to be covered on the news, it’s just a simple image on the internet that serves as a shorthand for a feeling and way of life.

First posted on October 4th, 2023 by X user @PhillipBankss, Just A Chill Guy was described by its creator as “my new character. his whole deal is he’s a chill guy that lowkey doesn’t give a fuck.” That tweet made little waves, but in the subsequent year, this image was shared countless times, inspired a meme coin (because of course it did), and has served as a shorthand for an unplugged personal brand and way of life that looks at the impending doom of our present day, and shrugs it off.

It’s the most meme meme of 2024!