Category Archives: Lists

The Best 30 Rock Episodes: A Chronological Journey, Part Two

Sara is big into reading and writing fiction like it's her job, because it is. That doesn't mean she isn't real as it gets. She loves real stuff like polka dots, indie rock, and underground fight clubs. I may have made some of that up. I don't know her that well. You can tell she didn't just write this in the third person because if she had written it there would have been less suspect sentence construction.
Sara

Hold on! Before reading this, make sure you’ve caught up with yesterday’s kickoff. Now, wave like a human being!

Liz Waves
Season 4, Episode 7: “Dealbreakers Talk Show #0001”
30 Rock’s ensemble cast began to sprawl out as the show went on, serving some characters better than others. In the first few seasons Jenna Maroney played an integral role as Liz’s best friend and working nightmare, the grotesquely narcissistic star of TGS who still made time to give her friend terrible life advice. But as Liz and Jack’s corporate relationship grew more personal, Jenna was often shunted into B and C stories; as her craziness became more outsized her position as Liz’s friend became more precarious. This is not to suggest Jane Krakowski doesn’t give everything she gets her all. But it does seem a bit of a shame in retrospect, especially when her presence can lift an entire episode into greatness, as it does with “Dealbreakers.” The early portion of season four introduced a new arc for Liz as she publishes a bestseller based on a catchphrase of one of Jenna’s TGS characters, but in another example of 30 Rock mocking the expectations of serialized stories (or, less charitably, losing interest in them), Liz’s shot at starring in a show based on the book is short-lived. After a disastrously hilarious shoot during which Liz turns into a bizarre marionette-approximation of a human (“Remember waving?” Pete yells helplessly) she locks herself in her dressing room and refuses to come out, just as Jenna often does, leading Jack to seek her counsel. This whole episode is about the fluidity of character traits; in Liz’s absence from the writer’s room, Frank, another supporting cast member I’ve yet to mention, steps into her role as den mother, scolding his colleagues and dressing in frumpy sweaters. It wouldn’t work if we didn’t know all these characters so well by now; by episode’s end the reset button has been hit but it’s still a jolt to a series that was starting to show its limits.
Continue reading The Best 30 Rock Episodes: A Chronological Journey, Part Two

The Best 30 Rock Episodes: A Chronological Journey, Part One

Sara is big into reading and writing fiction like it's her job, because it is. That doesn't mean she isn't real as it gets. She loves real stuff like polka dots, indie rock, and underground fight clubs. I may have made some of that up. I don't know her that well. You can tell she didn't just write this in the third person because if she had written it there would have been less suspect sentence construction.
Sara

Ten years ago this month a much-hyped new series premiered on NBC. Marketed as a rollicking satire of a very recognizable late-night sketch comedy show it boasted a starry cast and a strong TV auteur behind the scenes. It was Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and it tanked, hard. Its earnest investment in the trivial backstage drama of its characters, along with a tenuous grasp of what makes for good, or at least believable, comedy, doomed it to the cancellation bin after one season.

It’s odd now in hindsight to remember just how much of an underdog 30 Rock was when it debuted on the same network and in the same month as Studio 60. The brainchild of Tina Fey and based on her tenure as head writer of Saturday Night Live, the pedigree was more untested and it shows in the first several episodes. But voice and vision are paramount in a comedy and, at a time when NBC was struggling to find itself post Must-See-TV-Thursday, Fey and company stood out: the jokes were quick to the point of weaponization, often literally coming a second at a time, with a commitment to character beats as strong as to the outright bizarre set-piece. It also benefitted from a dynamite central pairing with Fey as the biographical-to-a-point Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy, her right-wing blowhard of a boss and singular comic creation. Even in the sloppily paced pilot their scenes have a spark that carried over seven seasons and remained reliable whenever the storytelling faltered over the 138 episodes that eventually ran. Ten years on, in the midst of so much “peak TV,” no currently airing comedy quite comes close to its alchemical mix of breakneck zaniness and reluctant heart, though Fey’s own Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt does its gosh-darndest. For a show that often worked deliberately against the serialization trend, 30 Rock amply rewards re-visiting and here are the fifteen best episodes to get you started, whether it’s your first time through or your thirtieth.
Continue reading The Best 30 Rock Episodes: A Chronological Journey, Part One

The Top 25 Best Radiohead Songs

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Let’s reflect for a moment on the beautiful oddity that Radiohead remains one of the biggest rock bands in the world, at a time when the very concept of “biggest rock band in the world” is often looked at as passé. If rock and roll’s moment has indeed passed, what in the name of the Beatles possesses people to follow Radiohead, of all artists, as if members of a religious cult, especially because said religious cult would not particularly worship rock and roll music as most people know it? It would be easy to ascribe the Radiohead following to their shapeshifting, and indeed there is an incredible variety of material across their nine-so-far records and various EPs, live cuts, and so forth. Yet it’s not as if A Moon Shaped Pool, their 2016 album and first in five years, is wildly unrecognizable as the same band that made The King of Limbs, which itself was not so radically different from In Rainbows, and so on, all the way back to the late ’90s (I’ll grant you that, OK, Pablo Honey sounds like a vastly different band, albeit an actually-pretty-good one; better, certainly, than the practitioners of Old Radiohead that cropped up in the early ’00s, a litany of Nerf Herders and Saves the Days to Radiohead’s Weezer).

In fact, it’s their ability to remain recognizably the Radiohead of the ’90s while going in different directions that makes them so exciting. A new Radiohead album, insular and strange and inscrutable as it can be, is still an event, the band’s mutations allowing it to survive the alt-rock boom, the rap-rock bust, the indie gold rush, the death of the album, and on and on. It was a no-brainer, then, that some of the founders, friends, and associates of SportsAlcohol.com would want to pledge our allegiance to the paranoid humanoids of Radiohead once again, through a list celebrating their best songs. Contributors were asked to send a ranked list of twenty; points were assigned accordingly.

In addition to your pals Rob, Marisa, Jesse, Sara, and special guest writer Maggie, we recruited a voting team ranging from people old enough to remember “Creep” playing on MTV to people who were born the year The Bends came out. Here are your Radiohead fans par excellence:

Darian Alexander is an attorney and Radiohead correspondent for Slate.
Emma Bennett is studying psychology and studio art at SUNY New Paltz.
Noah Casner is a drama major at New York University.
Timothy DeLizza is a lawyer, a fiction writer, and a gentleman.
A.A. Dowd is the film editor for The Onion’s A.V. Club.
Derrick Hart is an archivist and music fan.
Kate McKean is a literary agent, writer, and crafter.
Umer Piracha might love A Moon Shaped Pool more than anyone else who voted.
Ben Ross has had Radiohead blurbs locked and loaded for years.

The results heavily favored OK Computer, but well over half of Radiohead’s catalog received votes, including most of the new album. But why discuss the results when you can read a series of varied and passionate tributes to our collective favorites? Sometimes we had such varied and passionate responses that we doubled up the blurbing to get a fuller picture of this band we all love. Surprises, please:

The Top 25 Best Radiohead Songs (So Far)

Continue reading The Top 25 Best Radiohead Songs

The Top 32 Best David Bowie Songs of All Time

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

David Bowie is dead, at least in the traditional sense. It seems impossible, not just because he released a new album a few days before he died, but because he always carried with him an air of the otherworldly, even when he wasn’t dressed as a Goblin King. It’s probably a cliché to say so by this point, but it’s no less true: David Bowie seemed immortal, and because of that, and all of the great work he left behind, he actually is.

But the man himself is gone, and we’re still dealing with the surprising waves of grief. When he passed away early last week, it the founders of SportsAlcohol.com hard – and we soon found out from the outpouring of love and sadness on social media that we were far from alone. It should go without saying that Bowie amassed a great number of both devotees and casual fans during his time on this earth, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen such widespread appreciation of a musician who we were all so lucky to share a planet with, if only for a handful of decades.

If there’s a good thing about a beloved and galactically talented artist dying what seems like “before his time” (though Bowie’s 69 years surely counted for triple that in terms of accomplishments), it’s the feelings of both comfort and hurt that we can continue to take from his music. So: SportsAlcohol.com invited a bunch of Bowie fans to vote on the best of his many, many songs, with everyone submitting their votes via Top 20 lists. There was a surprising amount of consensus for a list like this. Maybe you can chalk that up to the hits – those inescapable, undeniable hits. But if many lists lacked a roster of fans-only deep cuts, maybe that’s because Bowie wrote and/or performed an unusual number of songs that are too universally beloved to be ignored. Consider also that many of these hits were not, as such, actual hits, at least not in the Hit Single sense. Many of their reputations grew with time, through their places on classic and endlessly replayable records; through transcendent moments in film; or just by being really fucking great.

In addition to your SportsAlcohol.com regulars Rob, Sabrina, Jesse, Marisa, Nathaniel, Sara, Jeremy, Craig, and Chris, we were lucky enough to secure participation from these fine people:

Megan Burns is a Queens-based painter. One time her mom begged her to stop talking about David Bowie.
Vikram Murthi writes film and TV criticism for the A.V. Club and elsewhere.
Bryan Nies and President Obama both have mothers. Their mothers were born in the same hospital. Ahem, credentials.
Dennis Perkins is a freelance film and TV writer for the A.V. Club and elsewhere, and lives in Portland, Maine.
Jeff Prisco is a robotics engineer (non-evil variety). When not dad-ing, he enjoys watching bad sci-fi (evil robot variety).
Ashley Strosnider is a writer and editor who lives in Nebraska.

Commencing countdown, engines on:
Continue reading The Top 32 Best David Bowie Songs of All Time

Best of 2015!

Gripes
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes

It was the blurst of years, and SportsAlcohol.com was there for every second of it. If you missed any of our end-of-2015 coverage, here’s what we’ll keep with us going forward.

Movies

List: Best Movies of 2015

Podcast: Best Movies of 2015

Plus: Special consideration is given to MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, our almost-consensus pick for best movie of the year (because Jesse is a jerk).

Music

List: Best Albums of 2015

Podcast: Best Music of 2015

Playlist: Best Music of 2015 on Spotify

Plus: We (meaning Sara) appreciates some of the best songs of the year, including “Downtown” by Majical Cloudz, “Bored in the USA” by Father John Misty, and “Sapokanikan” by Joanna Newsom.

Television

List: The Best TV Shows of 2015

Plus: Sara discusses two of the best anti-heroes in this years’ prestige series, and Marisa argues for more stand-alone episodes, because nobody wants to watch 13-hour movies as much as showrunners want to create them.

Theater

Rob wrote about Hamilton, the best musical to hit Broadway in 2015 and probably many years hence.

See you at the end of 2016, suckers!

The Best Movie of 2015 is Mad Max: Fury Road

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

We saw it multiple times. We bought the DVD. We podcasted about it. So it’s probably not a huge shock to announce the official SportsAlcohol.com best movie of 2015, or that all four of our moviegoing voters were happy to talk about it some more. Check out the fourteen movies this one left in its wake and then let’s rev up our discussion of:

1. Mad Max: Fury Road by George Miller

Theron
Continue reading The Best Movie of 2015 is Mad Max: Fury Road

The Best Movies of 2015

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

2015 at the movies: There were no fewer than three excellent and satisfying part sevens. 70mm came back to multiplexes. The cast of Ex Machina was in everything, even Star Wars. Women talked about things other than men. The same guy made The Cobbler and Spotlight. There was a fourth movie about singing chipmunks.

It was a weird year, and not without its eclectic, sometimes unexpected pleasures. For our yearly poll, SportsAlcohol.com’s certified heavy moviegoers Nathaniel, Jesse, Marisa, and Sara voted with our ridiculous hearts and came up with fifteen of the year’s strongest achievements in cinema. We also talked about it in an upcoming podcast. But before you listen to us, read us waxing rhapsodic about some of the year’s best.

The 15 Best Movies of 2015

Continue reading The Best Movies of 2015

The Best TV Shows of 2015

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

You may have heard the term “peak TV” tossed around this year. There certainly is a lot of it; some outlets have run top 20 or top 40 lists of the best shows of the year, and still managed to leave off plenty of great stuff. We here at SportsAlcohol.com like watching TV, but we also like respecting your time. So we tried to winnow our group list down to ten. Then, when that didn’t really work, we went for twelve – thirteen with an unbreakable tie. This, to us, feels manageable. You can catch up on these thirteen shows and feel like you’ve gotten up to speed with the best the medium has to offer. In fact, we emphatically insist that you do so right as soon as you finish this list. Let’s go!
Continue reading The Best TV Shows of 2015

’90s Week+!

Gripes
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes

The dream of the ’90s is still alive at SportsAlcohol.com, and during our thorough examination of the decade, we did the following:

…ranked and wrote about the top 90 songs of the ’90s in three groups (90-51, 50-11, and 10-1), and included a little behind-the-scenes about the voting process. (Before you ask: Yes, there is a Spotify playlist.) The ranked lists are worth clicking on for the era-appropriate photos of our contributors alone.

podcasted about the list so we could gripe about each other’s choices.

…defended some songs that didn’t make the list, including seven tracks that received No. 1 votes, and a few stray others that weren’t No. 1s but should have been in contention anyway.

…put ’90s music in context of music videos, movie soundtracks, and videos from movie soundtracks that specifically featured Elastica (a band that did not make our list).

…remembered that time that Chris wrote Rob an email entirely about Dana from Morphine.

…linked to some other articles that proved we’re not the only website still talking about the ’90s.

No fear.

90s Music Goes to the Movies

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

We intentionally dedicated last week to ’90s songs, rather than albums or movies or TV shows; the decade is too big to cover in great depth in a single week. But as Rob alluded to in his essential Soundtracks with Elastica Songs piece, a lot of great ’90s tunes turned up in a lot of great (and not-so-great) ’90s movies, for reasons both artistic and mercenary. So here we’re taking a look at how some of our Top 90 Songs of the ’90s fared in movies that actually came out during the ’90s, with a big assist from film fan and music enthusiast Sara Batkie. A lot of them involve Scenes of Teen Partying.

90s Music at the (90s) Movies

“Fake Plastic Trees” (#61) in Clueless (1995)
“Wah wah wah.” This is how Cher Horowitz reacts to Radiohead in Clueless, with the band standing in for all complaint rock that typically plays on college radio or at least does in Cher’s version of California. I didn’t realize until looking the soundtrack up that it’s actually an acoustic version of the song as its appearance in the film itself is brief and pretty muffled. It is notable, however, for backing the scene that introduces Josh, Cher’s ex-stepbrother and eventual love interest, a plaid-and-Amnesty-International tee-shirt-wearing foil to Cher’s candy-colored Beverly Hills princess. Like Thom Yorke’s sweetly abrasive crooning on the soundtrack, which is otherwise a mix of peppy pop rock numbers by Supergrass and Smoking Popes and sunny covers of Mott the Hoople and Kim Wilde, Josh doesn’t fit his surroundings at first glance. But Clueless remains a classic of its genre for its inclusiveness, from Di and Murray to stoner Travis, even teachers like Ms. Geist and Mr. Hall. In the end, just like Josh and Cher, “Fake Plastic Trees” works with the film because of its differences, not in spite of them. – Sara Batkie

Continue reading 90s Music Goes to the Movies