It’s that time of year again—the time when we all look back at the past 12 months and try to figure out what the hell just happened. Here on The Monitor, things are no different. In fact, that’s what this week’s entire episode is about. Yes, this week the WIRED Culture team started talking about 2016 and realized: Hey, you know what? This was a pretty good year for pop culture. We got some great new TV shows from Issa Rae (HBO’s Insecure) and Donald Glover (FX’s Atlanta), some great new...

Aside from turkey-eating, the biggest Thanksgiving tradition amongst your faithful WIRED Culture crew is sitting in front of the television not watching football. (OK, some of us watch football.) Our other tradition, of course, is fighting about what’s the best thing to watch while staring at that TV. For some of us, Community is always a crowd-pleaser. Others are Grey’s Anatomy die hards. And some of us just really love Die Hard. No, Die Hard isn’t a TV show. But it often plays on cable, so...

Alright, where to begin? Since we last stepped into the WIRED podcast booth, America elected a new president, Dave Chappelle took over hosting duties at Saturday Night Live for the first time, and A Tribe Called Quest released their first album in more than a decade. Yeah, it’s been a busy week. So busy, in fact, that we have a lot more to chat about on The Monitor than usual. We start by talking about the interesting political allegories to be found in the alien flick Arrival. From there...

Last night, Donald Trump won the US presidency. Last weekend, Doctor Strange won big at the box office. What do these two things have in common? Well, for one, they’re both surprising outcomes. And, for another, we’re talking about both of them in this week’s WIRED Culture podcast. First up, we’re discussing how Strange was received—both at the US box office, where it made $85 million this weekend, and with critics, who gave it a 90 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme...

Raise your hand if you’re watching Westworld. Great, thanks. Now, raise your hand if you spend as much time listening to podcasts and reading Reddit threads about the show as you do watching it. That’s what we thought. Aside from being HBO’s new wildly ambitious sci-fi program, Westworld has also become the Internet’s new favorite TV puzzle to solve, inspiring podcasts and comment threads galore. But just because it’s the latest Internet obsession, that doesn’t mean it’s the first. Not by a...

It’s a question so simple we can believe we haven’t asked ourselves before: Who is better, Tom Cruise or Ben Affleck? One of them, Affleck, dominated the box office last weekend with The Accountant. The other, Cruise (obvi), has a big weekend ahead with the release of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Both have had their tabloid ups and downs. Both have had careers that slalomed between popcorn movies and credibility pictures. But really, which Hollywood titan is better? That’s what we set out to...

If the month before a presidential election is a time ripe for anything, it’s political satire. Memes, op-ed essays, riffs by standup comedians—all these things hit fever-pitch levels in the weeks before folks got to the polls in the US. But nowhere has it been more prevalent this year than on late-night television. But who is doing it best? Is it Samantha Bee and the team at Full Frontal? Is it The Late Show with Stephen Colbert? Or is it Lin-Manuel Miranda hosting Saturday Night Live? All...

Westworld started life as a Michael Crichton movie. Luke Cage first burst on the scene as a comics character decades ago. This past weekend, both of those stories made their television debuts—and both are better suited for the small screen. At least, that’s what we think here at The Monitor. Luke Cage’s story, you see, is about one hero trying to help his community in Harlem. That’s a tale much better told in a series of episodes on Netflix than it is in a massive Avengers-vs.-everybody...

Sweet Christmas! After months of teasers, trailers, and WIRED cover stories, Marvel’s new Netflix series, Luke Cage, finally comes out today. And if you need to break up your binge-watching, we’ve got a special edition of The Monitor just for the occasion. In honor of our favorite bulletproof superhero, we caught up with Cheo Hodari Coker, Luke’s showrunner, who conceived of and led the transition from pulpy blaxploitation comic book to streaming-TV star. In this special edition of the...

You can’t fire up a Roku these days without immediately being offered a steady stream of shows about twenty-, thirty-, and fortysomethings figuring out their lives in the hip ‘burgs of cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (See: Love, You’re the Worst, Master of None, etc.) The most recent additions—Easy and High Maintenance—both dropped within the last couple weeks, and while we here at WIRED Culture are enjoying them, they’ve got us wondering: Are we at peak millennial...