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If you’re a loyal Decider reader, you’ll probably notice that more often than not, my byline precedes nearly all of the stories in our shopping section.

While I love shopping, scouring the internet for deals, and writing about all of the best products, I also watch a lot of TV and movies, and generally spend a lot of time online (I’m what you could call Very Online).

So, as we say goodbye to 2023, I thought, hey, I should probably talk about some of that stuff that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this year — and give all of those thoughts a place to live that isn’t just inside my own head.

Before you keep reading: there will be some spoilers ahead for things like Riverdale, Ted Lasso, Theater Camp, Schmigadoon!, and The Righteous Gemstones. You’ve been warned!

Without any further ado, here are the top 10 things that lived rent free in my head this year, starting at 10 and counting down to number one.

Those Guys Who Went To Every Margaritaville on the Continent and Vlogged It

They had 22 stops, one rental car, and a dream. After spending three weeks in 2022 roadtripping to every Rainforest Café on the continent, Youtubers Ted Nivison and Eddy Burback embarked on an even longer, more ambitious roadtrip to hit another staple of American vacation restaurant chains: Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville (and the companion Margaritaville resorts where applicable), and of course, they both vlogged the entire thing.

In the span of roughly two hours, you’ll experience the entire spectrum of human emotion; as Burback, who initially wasn’t into the essence of Margaritville, begins to buy into the whole experience, Nivison’s feelings about the tropical chain change in the opposite direction.
Tom Cruise Driving A Motorcycle Off A Cliff in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

When I look back at the media that defined 2023 for me, the Mission: Impossible movies will certainly be high on that list. There is no movie quite like a Tom Cruise action movie, and this year’s installment, Dead Reckoning Part One, absolutely delivered despite Cruise’s Ethan Hunt spending most of its runtime trying to fight a computer.

Since the seventh Mission: Impossible was initially announced, Paramount teased “the biggest stunt in cinema history,” going as far as showing the entire thing in trailers before the movie hit theaters in July. It was kind of hard to have missed if you saw movies in theaters this spring, or even watched some TV. Basically, Tom Cruise drives off a cliff. And then he lets go.

It’s crazy even by Ethan Hunt standards (and Ethan has jumped out of windows, piloted helicopters, held onto the side of a plane as it took off, and scaled the world’s largest building), but knowing it was coming didn’t take away from the moment it finally happened inside the movie.
where to stream mission: impossible – dead reckoning part one
Riverdale Says Farewell By Giving Us Everything and Nothing

Photo: The CW

Since the very first episode of Riverdale back in 2017, characters on the show used the term “endgame” to define relationships — specifically in relation to Betty, Archie, Veronica, and Jughead. “Betty and Archie aren’t dating, but they are endgame,” says Kevin Keller in the series premiere. “Because we’re endgame, Archie,” Veronica tells him at a later point in the show’s run.

When the final season of Riverdale was announced, it seemed like, finally, we might be headed toward those endgames — the core four have to end up in some kind of pairings, right? As it turns out, wrong. But what we did get was so much better than anything I could have imagined.

In a series finale that jumps a year into the future, we see the whole gang’s last day of high school (in the 1950s universe) for the first time through the eyes of Betty. In it, we learn that she, along with Archie, Veronica, and Jughead, essentially spent their entire senior year in a polycule before breaking up and going separate ways. They all dated and no one ended up together forever!

Perfect show, 10/10, absolutely no notes.
where to stream riverdale
“Doorway to Where” from Schmigadoon! Season 2

As a musical theater geek whose expertise falls squarely in the time period Season 2 of Schmigadoon! parodied, I was eager to see how they’d play upon the tropes, themes, ideas, and characters of this darker era to create character and song mashups to fit the world of the show. Overall, the season delivered, but Aaron Tveit got the biggest laughs out of me during his introduction in Season 2, Episode 2.

Afro-wig-clad, Tveit belts out “Doorway to Where,” and if that title reminds you of the Pippin classic “Corner of the Sky,” you’d be exactly right to make that comparison. Tveit is essentially doing Pippin as a lead character from “Hair,” with elements of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell sprinkled in.
where to stream Schmigadoon!
Please Don’t Destroy — “The Stakeout”

Please Don’t Destroy’s short films that air during episodes of Saturday Night Live bring me back to a time when I was way too young to be watching The Lonely Island music videos — and that’s shaped my taste in comedy as I’ve grown up. My favorite bit the trio returns to time and again is the idea that Martin Herlihy and John Higgins are in on something that Ben Marshall isn’t, and the best use of this came in Season 48’s Woody Harrelson-fronted episode in a short titled “The Stakeout.”

This short (like most of PDD’s work) is best when you know absolutely nothing going into it, so I’ll just say: happy watching!
where to stream saturday night live
Asteroid City

Photo: Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection

This summer, I left a screening of Asteroid City feeling like I needed to immediately turn back around and watch the entire film again knowing everything I now knew about it. So less than one day later, I was back at my local AMC seated for Asteroid City, round two. That’s when I knew this movie was something special.

The layered exploration of grief that Asteroid City presents is a lot to take in at first, since there are two narratives running parallel to each other. One, in color, is the events of a play titled Asteroid City, and the other shows “real life” — the author of the play, his actors, and the road to staging a production. In typical Wes Anderson fashion, Asteroid City has an all-star ensemble cast, but Jason Schwartzman expertly leads both narratives as actor Jones Hall and the character Jones portrays, Augie Steenbeck. Jones and Augie are more similar than they might seem as the twin narratives unfold, and it’s with him that the film’s entire story comes into focus.

When Jones tells the play’s director that he still doesn’t understand the play, and the director replies, simply, with “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story,” it becomes clear that the play is grief — it’s something we don’t understand, but life has to go on despite it.
where to stream asteroid city
Ted Lasso Season 3, Episode 6: “Sunflowers”

About 20 minutes into this hour-long episode of Ted Lasso, as the team debates how they should spend their night off, Colin (Billy Harris) tells Trent Crimm (James Lance), “I didn’t come to Amsterdam to learn things,” and unknowingly sets off a chain of events that leads to a few key members of the team and coaching staff, himself included, leaving the city changed in some way. Some find love, others find acceptance, and Ted himself finds that he might actually understand soccer after all.

It’s an episode designed to make you feel all different kinds of emotions, and feel things I did.
where to stream ted lasso
Heartstopper Season 2 – 2023’s Best Book-to-Screen Adaptation

Photo: Netflix

This year, my favorite show to laugh, cry, swoon, and yell at my TV to was Heartstopper Season 2, in part because of how well adapted it is from the graphic novel series by Alice Oseman. The series isn’t just an adaptation of Oseman’s story, though they wrote all eight episodes of the season, managed to lift dialogue word-for-word from the book, and included subplots that I was sure might get left on the cutting room floor (namely the plot involving the teachers, but it warmed my heart to see Mr. Farouk get his Heartstopper moment!).

It also adapts Oseman’s illustrations, from locations and set decorating, to casting — I’ll never get over how much Kit Connor looks like the illustrated Nick Nelson. There’s even a scene in the season where Connor and Joe Locke, as Nick and Charlie, are dressed in outfits identical to those on the cover of Heartstopper Volume 3, down to the colors of their sneakers and backpacks.

Put simply: no one else is doing it like Heartstopper.
where to stream heartstopper
Noah Galvin’s Standout Performance in Theater Camp

Photo: Searchlight Pictures/Everett Collection

To be clear, Noah Galvin gives a standout performance in any movie he’s in (see: the Booksmart karaoke scene and his scathing pronunciation of “ALAN!”), but he’s operating on another level entirely in Theater Camp (which he also cowrote). Galvin portrays Glenn, the head technical director at AdirondACTS, and if you’ve ever done theater before, you know just how spot-on his portrayal of an overworked backstage technician really is — that scene where he rolls down the hill instead of running because he’s so overwhelmed by being needed everywhere is deeply relatable.

He shines in every moment of screentime he gets, but I particularly loved his scenes opposite Jimmy Tatro (his most frequent screen partner in the film), and the subtle ways he plays Glenn’s real desire to perform, leading to an incredible reveal as the summer at AdirondACTS comes to a close.
where to stream theater camp
The Righteous Gemstones Finally Defines Kelvin and Keefe’s Relationship

Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO

The will-they-or-won’t-they between youth pastor Kelvin Gemstone (Adam Devine) and his former Satanist best friend Keefe Chambers (Tony Cavalero) has been as integral to The Righteous Gemstones as the Gemstone Church itself since the very first episode. At a certain point, it becomes clear that there’s a lot more to this friendship than just friendship — around the same time the show starts going out of its way to include Keefe in situations with Judy’s husband B.J. and Jesse’s wife Amber, positioning him as the third Gemstone sibling-in-law rather than just Kelvin’s good friend.

I really thought that’d all we’d get, though; I hadn’t envisioned the show taking it any further. Then Season 3, Episode 8 aired.

The penultimate episode shows what the entire third season has been building toward: the Gemstone sibs are working together to run the church. They’re getting ready for their first Sunday service as a united front. Jesse and Judy spend a moment with their respective spouses, and Kelvin…

Kelvin finally — finally — kisses Keefe. And the crowd (read: me, alone, watching this episode in my dark bedroom) goes WILD.

So, there you have it: the number one thing that’s been living rent free in my head since July 30, 2023 — when this show managed to genuinely surprise me by doing the one thing I thought they’d never do.
where to stream The Righteous Gemstones