1. The Neil Breen Award for Worst Performance (Owen1120) DOUBLE WINNER!!

• Ezra Miller’s still nebbishy and antisemitic take on Barry Allen, The Flash (19)
• Whatever the fuck Jonathan Majors was doing as Kang the Conqueror in Loki (19)
• Chris Pratt as Mario, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (16)
• The entire cast, but especially Charlie Hunnam’s “space Irish” accent as Kai, Rebel Moon (9)
• Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte, making one of the most charismatic generals in history a sullen, whiny brat with mommy issues that spends most of the movie staring intently at people rather than actually saying anything, Napoleon (3)
• Jay Rincon as P-3, the English dub of Atomic Heart. “Crispy critters!” (3)

2. The Blizzard’s Bargain Basement Award for Worst New Character (Wolfman Jew)

• Zara Khan, Archer. Very strange move to add a Poochie character to a show in its final season! (11)
• The wacky, whimsical pirates who mostly talk in lampshades of RPG tropes, Sea of Stars (7)
• Every single character, Viewfinder. Hey, would you like to have your serene, contemplative puzzle game interrupted by a bunch of adults who behave like hormonal teenagers acting out the pettiest, most banal dramas imaginable? No? Too fucking bad! (6)
• So this is cheating, because he’s also the best worst new character, but Horace the Host, Everybody 1-2 Switch! A beautiful, BoJack Horseman-looking monstrosity born out of Nintendo’s development team realizing that the English words “Horse” and “Host” sound… kinda sorta similar (6)
• Past Barry, who is actually a different and apparently terrible character to normal Barry, The Flash. Damnit, Barry (5)
• The deliberately shallow, selfish, and self-interested side characters who drive Nintendo’s great social satire into a more… “Leatherface killing influencers” direction, Pikmin 4 (5)
• Gabriel, Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I. Can also count for worst villain of the year (5)

3. The Fastest, Longest, Most Embarrassing Flop Alive Award for Worst Return for the Effort Put In (Owen1120)

• The Flash, the culmination of years and years of work, over a decade of trying to make a live action Flash movie, and acting as the ostensible lynchpin to a cinematic universe with something like ten to fifteen movies. And now it’s… a giant flop, an embarrassment, a vehicle for a star who spent part of their time evading the cops on Warner Bros.’ dime while going to reshoots (45)
• Phase IV of the MCU, which learned (GOTG 3 aside) that a massive shared universe can encourage people to see movies they otherwise would have passed up, right up until it encourages people to avoid movies they otherwise would have seen. Special shout-out to The Marvels, sequel to billion dollar movie Captain Marvel that has three separate TV miniseries, aired over 3 different years, as set-up for its various heroes (42)
• Making your whole life about Bored Apes, going to a Bored Ape concert and then getting rewarded with temporary blindness from your eyes getting burned by disinfectant UV lights (30)
• Secret Invasion. Shot twice, and this was the best we got (22)
• Indiana Jones 5 costs over $300 million dollars (more than The Flash’s official budget, though that almost certainly hides the cost of the the latter’s many years of rewrites and reshoots), only for it to be almost invisible until weeks before its launch and its absurd premiere at Cannes (14)

4. The Practically Tripped Over Your Own Dick Award for Worst Action Choreography (Shit-Master Slootfass)

• The Night Trooper sequence, Ahsoka (24)

• That god-awful final fight, Secret Invasion (12)
• “Any action scene,” Rebel Moon (8)
• Oh yeah, old Michael Keaton Batman A) did martial arts moves like that, and B) STILL does moves like that, The Flash (2)

5. Worst Marketing, of any Kind, from Commercials to Posters to More (Lovely Lily Bones, Owen1120, Antler Queen Carson Shaw, Eagle Hand Sleigh Co.)

• Mutual nomination: Fanduel and other betting site commercials, and the Jameson’s commercials on Hulu that required viewers (including the nominator, an alcoholic) to “choose your cocktail” before watching The Old Man (28)
• The Mean Girls Movie Musical ad that did not make it clear in any way that the movie is a musical (25)
• The other promotional campaign pretending a musical isn’t a musical (The Color Purple) (17)
• Any and all DC related movies that were abandoned by WBD (15)
• Bethesda customer support responding to negative reviews of Starfield on Steam with hilariously bad justifications for unpopular features. For example: “Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design—but that’s not boring. ‘When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored” (13)

The Peely’s would also like to extent a general Lifetime Achievement Award to this year’s bizarre and unfortunate trope of marketing musicals with the apparently intent to completely hide their nature as musicals, since this went beyond Mean Girls and The Color Purple with Wish (which instead emphasized Alan Tudyk’s baby goat character talking about his butt) and Wonka.

6. The “Because You Didn’t Demand It!” Award for Worst Franchise Extension (Pliny the Elder, Yuri Petrovitch, Mr Ixolite) 

• Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey asks what the people really wanted from a classic children’s property: what if Pooh Bear and Piglet were serial killers? (35)
• The four DCEU movies put out this year. Four (23)
• Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Yes, let’s do an entire prequel game around a weak character that was never heroic… (23)
• Skull Island: Rise of Kong for bringing King Kong back into video games through… whatever the hell this is (21)

https://youtu.be/fMJ4YXkrOXo

• Hogwarts Legacy keeping that series relevant and financially solvent via tens of millions in sales despite its utter mediocrity and the fact that it directly profits a hate movement (17)

7. Horizon’s Bad Luck Award for Project that May Have Been Good or Bad, but Utterly Crushed Under the Weight of Bigger and Better Things (Wolfman Jew)

• Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I opening a week after the “Barbieheimer” phenomenon (24)
• Starfield coming with such big expectations that Baldur’s Gate 3 pushes its launch date up a month—only for the Baldur’s Gate post-release hype to blow up so big that Starfield itself can’t escape its gravity [and to a certain extent, a lot of the year’s best releases felt like this to Starfield, which struggled with a slowly bubbling backlash to Bethesda] (22)
• This category’s namesake suffered this yet again when Horizon: Forbidden West’s Burning Shore’s DLC was released right up against Tears of the Kingdom, the sequel to the game that culturally crushed the first Horizon (13)
• Sonic Superstars releasing the same day as Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Alan Wake 2 (12)
• Almost every trailer at the Game Awards 2023 coming out days after Rockstar dropped the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer, in all its Tom Petty and alligator-filled glory (10)
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves being sandwiched between John Wick and Mario (10)

8. Schmigadoon Award for most Inconvenient to Watch Media / Best Thing Locked Behind a Service, Platform, or Device You Don’t Want (SadClown / Lovely Bones)

• Yellowjackets, Paramount+ with Showtime (19)
• Having to jump through hoops just to find the TCM category in MAX (18)
• Doctor Who being divided between the stuff on Max, the stuff on Disney, and the stuff on Tubi (17)
• Poker Face, Peacock—and after Comcast stopped giving out those lovely Peacock subs to subscribers, too (14)
• The Curse, Showtime (13)

9. The Bronze Embracer for Worst Cancellation of a Released or Unfinished Work, Series, or Product in 2023 (Owen1120, Ice Cream Planet)

• A League of Their Own. False hope of more episodes, a scant four but still, and then still killed off with the Writer’s Strike used as weak retroactive punishment (28)
• Coyote v. Acme, though to be fair it was uncanceled following a backlash (13)
• An odd example, as the game was released but was made as a “live service” that would be in public development for years (and was also terribly bad), but The Day Before closing shop not years later like an ideal live service, but after four days. That’s… a lot (11)
• Naughty Dog throwing away literal years of work on a live service game set in the Last of Us universe after coming to the realization that they didn’t have the manpower to support it. You couldn’t have reached that realization a little earlier, studio heads? (10)
• Snowpiercer completing full post-production on Season 4 only axed by TNT (9)

10. Most Shovelware of Media (Lovely Bones)

• The GameMill Entertainment Oeuvre, which almost single-handedly resurrected all our memories of the licensed shovelware of yesteryear. Specifically: Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance, The Walking Dead: Destinies, and Skull Island: Rise of Kong—only like half of the games they released in 2023 alone. Many were produced under exploitative and abusive conditions wherein GameMill recruits a small, international independent developer with no power to assert themselves and limited ability to even communicate, gives them no time, guidance, or resources, and forces them into endless unpaid overtime to slap together the product in record time (20)
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, whose four years of development were obscured horrible labor abuse, a minuscule budget, and an extremely inexperienced team whose work was previously point and click adventures, not elaborate stealth action games (12)
• The Day Before, possibly the biggest game debacle in a year of huge gaming debacles that surrounded a “janky ass empty cash grab of a game” (12)
• James Somerton’s YouTube channel (7)
• The Last Hope – Dead Zone Survival, the nigh-unplayable Last of Us ripoff so nakedly derivative that it was erased from digital stores soon after it became a viral hit (6)

11. Most Spectacular Self-Own (Lovely Lily Bones)

• Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign (51)
• Jonathan Majors’ legal team releasing evidence that incriminated him (23)
• The Rise and Fall of Kevin McCarthy (21)
• Jim Jordan’s attempt to become House Speaker (21)
• Oceangate’s CEO (20)

12. The Miles Bron Is An Idiot Award for Elon Musk’s Greatest Debacle of the Year (LibraryLass)

• Renaming Twitter to X and removing the bird logo (40)
• Cursing out advertisers at a huge event several times, complete with gaps for audience cheers and laughter that never came, then acting shocked when more of them fled (38)
• Declaring “cis” a slur (35)
• Cybertruck, just everything about it. When even the Transformers think you’re beneath them… (31)
• Trying to sue agencies which pointed out Twitter was now placing ads on racist feeds for defamation claiming the research was manipulated. As an added bonus, admitting in the court filing the results were in fact possible, just not likely, without a trace of irony that doing so completely absolves them of defamation (25)

13. The JK Rowling Award for Worst Egregious Celebrity Behavior (Antler Queen Carson Shaw, Pershing48)

• Jonathan Majors (42)
• Former Spanish soccer federation president Luis Rubiales, who grabbed player Jenni Hermoso’s head and kissed her after Spain won the the Women’s World Cup (35)
• A late contender: Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, a reprise of his 2018 Peely for “Most Unjustified Arrogance” (28)
• Scott Adams falling apart, then falling apart even further after just about every newspaper drops Dilbert (18)
• If YouTubers count as celebrities, and tragically we know they do, then Jirard the Completionist’s charity fraud (13)

14. The “It’s Riku, They Put Bugs in Him!” Award for Worst Technical Performance (Lovely Lily Bones)

• Kotaku, The A.V. Club, and other G/O Media sites becoming unusable due to ads, scripts, and various Kinja bugs that have been known for years yet never fixed (21)
• Cities Skylines II. Prior to release publisher Paradox & developer Colossal Order acknowledged that the game’s performance did not meet their own benchmarks but would still release the game anyway. This is in spite of eye-raising minimum / recommended system requirements to run the game in the first place. In classic video game company manner, there were also vague assertions that their game is just so gosh darn cutting edge and if you have problems running it then it’s on you to buy a higher end PC to play it (16)
• Mortal Kombat 1 for Switch. Worse visual downscaling than 11 (whose downscaling for and performance on Switch is considered a technical benchmark) with absolutely no performance gain. Plus, shipped with an entire mode missing. Just wait for Switch 2, guys (11)
• Starfield (10)
• Twitter/X falling to pieces after dozens of its engineers were fired or quit (8)

15. It’s 2023 so… C’mon, Why Not Award for a Lack of Basic Accessibility Features in a 2023 Product or Service (Soufflé Cat)

• Netflix still somehow failing to provide subtitles for on-screen text in most anime and K-dramas, long after services like Crunchyroll have already figured out how to do this (14)
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder still having the same one-thumb control scheme on a console with multiple shoulder buttons unless you remap the controls at the system level (11)
• Advance Wars 1 + 2 Re-Boot Camp being unplayable for people with color blindness (10)
• Mail Time needed a map, all games need maps, “JUST GIVE ME A MAP I GET LOST SO EASILY” (7)
• Palia. Just… all of it. Terrible controller support for PC, every patch introduces new bugs and often doesn’t resolve any of the old ones. No UI or text scaling. Color/brightness problems. I know multiple people who cannot make use of a recently introduced *gameplay feature* due to their particular disability. Perhaps the worst part is they have an accessibility channel on their discord where studio employees do interact with people, so they do SEE this feedback, and yet absolutely none of it gets addressed (3)

16. Worst Deployment of This Year’s Prerequisite Tech Trend, AI Generation (Lovely Lily Bones / Shit-Master Slootfass). DOUBLE WINNER!!

• The multiple lawyers sanctioned after submitting an AI-written legal brief—which cited multiple entirely made up cases. Sources for three separate incidents (32)
• ICYMI, the people behind the “AIs pretending to be historical figures” app, creating (extremely bad) simulacra of historical figures that whitewash their history. For example: Henry Ford’s AI downplaying his antisemitism, Mao Zedong being anti-violence and pro-landlord, and Himmler apologizing for the Holocaust. It also locks the Hitler, Jesus, and Queen Elizabeth II AIs behind a “500 coin” paywall, meaning that they put fucking DLC into this already horrible service (32)
• Every instance of an “AI Undress” app, creating non-consensual nudes of people (28)
• The Calm app, which zombifies beloved icon Jimmy Stewart via audio-generation AI for the sake of reading you bedtime stories (23)
• MSN Travel publishing an AI-written article about tourism in Ottawa rife with errors like incorrect names and photos. But the real doozy was the fact that it recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank, closing the recommendation with the following line: “Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach.” (Here’s a piece about it for the CBC) (18)

17. The Louie from Pikmin’s Cookbook Award for Most Cursed Food Item (Real Division) (Shit-Master Slootfass)

• Panera Charged Lemonade (35)
• Doritos Nacho Cheese Liquor (14)
• Starbucks Oleato, coffee with olive oil for some reason (12)
• Meatloaf prepared at an unlicensed shared kitchen causing a massive E. coli outbreak at Calgary daycares (11)
• Cantaloupe in Canada killing seven people and infecting hundreds with salmonella (11)

18. Most Egregious Corporate Malfeasance (Lovely Lily Bones)

• Substack saying “Sure Nazis are bad but it’s actually worse for fighting them if we don’t give them a voice so we’re gonna keep them” (44)
• Studios holding out over AI during the writers and actors strikes, a good example of how abuse of consumers and abuse of labor often go hand in hand (33)
• Panera and the refillable Death Lemonade (28)
• The Unity fee restructuring debacle that would have seen some developers lose money on game downloads, theoretically use invasive software, and threatened a large swath of the independent games industry (21)
• Bandai attempting to retroactively claim that the Witch from Mercury leads weren’t gay when the entire point of the series is that they are gay. Going so far as to delete interviews where cast had expressly referred to them as being married, claiming their relationship was “open for interpretation” (19)

19. Worst Labor Abuse (Lovely Lily Bones)

• Mutual nomination of Marvel Studios / Disney, for its treatment of its FX creators and Sony Animation, for its treatment of the creators on the Spider-Verse films (39)
• In a year filled with mass studio layoffs, Embracer Group culling thousands of jobs and closing decades-old studios after years of hyper consolidation and a failed deal with the Saudi Arabian government (19)
• Sega of America retaliated against its new union by firing them and outsourcing their positions (17)
• Amazon (15)
• Chipotle continuing to violate child labor laws—mainly overtime regulatory violations – after being fined millions of dollars for the same types of malfeasance over the past several years. So consider getting your avocado fix somewhere else (12)
• Bug Films, makers of the anime Zom100 (which is about breaking free of hellish working conditions to enjoy life) having such hellish working conditions that episodes kept getting delayed until the entire series lost its time slot and wasn’t finished (12)

We would also like to extend a sympathetic mention of the broader mass layoffs in the tech and gaming industries, the latter having this year along culled an estimated nine thousand jobs and almost all of which are lost instead of executives taking even a modest pay cut.

20. Most Egregious Corporate Malfeasance and Labor Abuse by Hasbro and its Subsidiaries (LibraryLass, Merve)

• Hiring Pinkertons, yes, Pinkertons, to pursue and raid people to confiscate ‘leaked’ Magic the Gathering cards. Including from people the company itself sent the product to for promotional purposes, but just sent them too early (36)
• Laying off over 1,000 people two weeks before Christmas (29)
• The D&D OGL debacle, in which Wizards of the Coast attempted to retroactively claim 23 years’ worth of what had been legally permitted third party work to such a degree that would put many independent creators out of business (22)
• The fact that CEO Chris Cocks earns 110 times as much as the median employee of his company (13)
• Not firing Mike Mearls for passing on information to notorious sexual abuser and harasser Zak Smith about his accusers that had been shared with him in confidence for multiple years until finally laying him off along with thousands of other employees this year (13)

21. Universal Designated Hitter Award for the Worst Aspect of Sports in 2023 (Tigercat919)

• All Things Online Sports Betting (44)
• The NHL being feckless idiots dealing with LGBTQ and First nations related controversies, including a ban on pride merch (28)
• Aaron Rodgers (24)
• The NFL spreading football games over the whole Christmas holiday, including Christmas Eve and all Christmas Day (21)
• The college football playoff committee deciding that 12-1 Alabama deserves a title shot more than 13-0 Florida State, because what are wins and losses in the face of maybe not having an SEC team win the title for once? (17)

22. Most Baffling, Banal, or Bone-Headed Plot Twist or Development (Wolfman Jew)

• Nick Fury collected all of the Avengers’ DNA for no reason, all stored in the same vial, Secret Invasion (32)
• Pooh and Piglet’s motivation to be serial killers is that Christopher Robin abandoned them to starve, forcing them to eat Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (22)
• Riverdale’s cynical, last-minute off-hand reveal that Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica were a largely offscreen polycule for a while (14)
• Carol Danvers destroyed her previous antagonist the Supreme Intelligence, it had massive consequences, and this just sort of happened, The Marvels (10) 
• Maria Hill dies and Nick Fury has a Skrull wife, Secret Invasion (9)

23. You’re a Shining, Suicidal Star Award for Weirdest—Not Worst, Necessarily, but Weirdest—Adaptational Change (Wolfman Jew)

• Lumalee isn’t a generic friendly merchant but a happily suicidal child, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (24)
• The very existence of Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, a Ubisoft crossover Netflix series featuring a frog assassin from Assassin’s Creed and platformer mascot Rayman as the drug snorting, eats-food-off-naked-ladies propaganda mouthpiece for a fascist regime (17)
• The adoptive Wayne son at the center of this story isn’t any of the several Robins, but the OC Turner Hayes, The CW’s Gotham Knights (16)
• Cranky Kong, king of the GoKarts, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (14)
• Original villains introduced to focus on the literal Shazam mythology while punting Shazam’s classic villain Mister Mind, who had previously appeared only in a post-credits scene, to a second post credits scene, Shazam: Fury of the Gods (13)

24. The Wilbur Falling Off a Cruise Ship Award for Most Baffling Thing to Happen in a North American Comic Strip this Year (Pershing48)

• Root beer paternity test, Mary Worth (29)
• So Crankshaft basically murdered his friend and mentor (22)
• “Authentic Vegan Behavior”, Mary Worth (21)
• Funky Winterbean’s invasion into Crankshaft (19)
• Aaugghh!/Wilbur incident, Mary Worth (16)

25. The Mario’s Time Machine Award for Most Glaring Factual Inaccuracy or Misrepresentation in a Piece of Fictional Media (Merve)

• Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is generally fast and loose with history (25)
• Oppenheimer’s Harry Truman scene (15)
• The Iron Claw omitting a whole Von Erich brother (11)
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Castle Bravo nuclear test (6)

26. Worst Fan Behavior (Lovely Lily Bones / Ice Cream Planet)

• The repeat offense of throwing things at celebrities’ heads during live events. The starkest example: a person tossing their mother’s ashes at P!nk (43)
• The Sound of Freedom “fans” harassing actual human trafficking victims (36)
• Harassment in defense of Hogwarts Legacy (35)
• Jonathan Majors Defenders (18)
• Jenni Hermoso receiving death threats because Luis Rubiales was fired for assaulting her (14)
• Threats that shut down Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo (14)

27. His (with Almonds) and Hers (without Almonds) Chocolate Award for Lamest Product of 2023 Designed to Appeal to Conservatives (Tigercat919)

• Multiple explicitly right-wing coffee brands (17)
• Daily Wire movies like Lady Ballers (12)
• Dad’s Ultra-Right Beer (10) 
• “Rich Men north of Richmond” (4)
• The Daily Wire’s Bentkey platform for kids, featuring knockoff Bluey (2)

We’d also like to make a Lifetime Achievement for Black Rifle Coffee, a coffee brand meant to cater to 2nd Amendment supporters… in Alberta, which does not have a 2nd Amendment.

28. Saving Grace Award for Best Performance Elevating a Weak Project (Kid Presentable)

• Jack Black, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (20) 
• Olivia Colman, Secret Invasion (15)
• Michael Keaton, The Flash (12)
• Ray Stevenson, Ahsoka (6)
• Nic Cage as Dracula, Renfield (5)

29. Best Moment That’s Just Deeply Satisfying to the Primordial Lizard Part of Our Brains (Lovely Lily Bones)

For this year (our own personal sanity, particularly since WordPress seems unable to indent bullet points again and I’m fading from going to sleep after 3AM on New Year’s Eve and well past 1AM the night before publication), we won’t be tallying the votes for this one and instead combine every entry into one smorgasbord of lizard brain fun.

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: both triumphant successes and spectacular failures as a result the game’s vehicle building. Attaching rockets to anything and everything. The Yiga Clan are back and this time they’re going to run you over with a truck. The narrative essentiality of Ganondorf’s barrel-chested sexiness. The well fetishist. And the climactic, harlequin romance-y loss of Link’s shirt
• Barbie: adding “beaching off” to the cultural lexicon. The plastic vehicles getting flung around. The movie overtly dismissing the literal Mattel CEO character who vows to always put feminism ahead of profit. The Grant Morrison-style encounters with Barbie’s creator, both a mythic god-mom and a ghost with tax evasion charges.
• Poker Face: dildo eye gouging
• Poor Things: Mark Ruffalo goes full Streetcar, wailing “Bellaaaaaaaa” outside her window
• The Boy and the Heron: Robert Pattinson gives an unrecognizable and truly incredible voice performance as the titular Heron. Also, the titular Boy is Miyazaki’s most delightfully unsweet, unidealized, downright feral child protagonist yet. 
• Baldur’s Gate 3: Demonic romantic confessions, and critical hit dice rolls to befriend talking animals.
• Ahsoka: the live action versions of beloved Star Wars Rebels characters. 
• Resident Evil 4 Remake: All of Leon’s new stupid one-liners
• Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Roxie Richter gets away with kissing the girl and humming the hamster dance song of all things
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder: the multiple in-game musicals
• The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart: the Pants Golem and the following credit: “Jay Pharaoh as Nuno Blood / Additional Blackulas”
• My Adventures with Superman steals the flash step from Bleach and makes it cool
• Guardians of the Galaxy 3: Cosmo the Spacedog, whose character arc was that she wants to be called a good dog after she was once called a bad dog
• Spider-Man 2: web slinging and wing-gliding around three New York boroughs
• SlayersX, a Hypnospace Outlaw spinoff: the Glass Blasta and Sewage Launcher weapons
• Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name: an actual “cool guys don’t look at explosions” animation
• Pikmin 4: the boss fight against disco robot Groovy Long Legs. Sacrificing Pikmin to wake up boss battles
• Paranormasight: why is there a Voice Volume option in a game without voice acting… OH
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake: Fiona’s outfit keeps getting ripped up to be cooler, butcher, and more roller derby-inspired
• John Wick: Chapter 4: John Wick falls down so, so many stairs
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Half the advertised characters die immediately
• M3Gan: the dance rampage in
• Beau is Afraid: the giant talking penis monster.

30. Grate Expectations Award for Project That Sounded So Dumb On Paper and Turned Out To Be Good (Michael Weyer)

• Barbie (48)
• Wonka (16)
• M3gan (15)
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (12)
• The musical episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (12)

31. The Quibi Show that Started Okay and Ended Horribly Award for Most Obscure Disappointment of 2023 (Merve)

• The movie Organ Trail (23)
• Magic Mike’s Last Dance (11)
• (Bones’ experience with physical sickness from) the video game Jusant (7) 
• Some Battlebots drama, largely revolving around the team Riptide and its antivaccination sponsor / father of the team captain (5) 
• David Bello’s solo album sucking (2)

32. Thought You Could Get Away from Us, Eh? Award for Worst Thing from 2022 That Failed to Score a Win or Nomination at Last Year’s Awards (Lovely Lily Bones)

• Fantastic Beasts 3: The Secrets of Dumbledore (46)
• The Golden Globes That Wasn’t (13) 
• To Die For, about a guy holding up an American flag continuously. Written by, directed by, and starring John Schneider, AKA Bo Duke, AKA Smallville‘s abominably bad Pa Kent (2)

33. The Balan’s About Award for Worst Pre-2023 Pop Culture that You Experienced for the First Time this Year (Merve)

• Balan Wonderworld (9) 
• Babylon (a movie Lovely Bones loved) (9)
• Green Lantern (2011) (8) 
• Munchie Strikes Back (7)
• Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets (7)

34. Airing of Grievances over the Episodes of the Television Program Smallville and the Content Therein which Wolfman Jew Aired as Live Shows, November 30, 2022 – December 27, 2023 (Wolfman Jew)

• Ostensible paragon of heroism Superman is portrayed as a sexist peeping predator
• The surprisingly intensive amount of incestuous content for a Superman show, peaking in a season finale when teenage Clark Kent is seduced by his naked teenage cousin… who is later revealed to be not a Kryptonian, but a dead human girl “merely” possessed by the ghost of Clark’s biological father.
• Chloe Sullivan, a character played by a future sexual abuser and cult lieutenant who speaks entirely in Joss Whedon / Dennis Miller-style pop culture and historical references, goes from being the show’s worst character to one of its best not by her own material improvement but by other characters like Lana Lang actively becoming worse over time
• Chloe’s hair throughout the seasons. Fashion too, really
• The show transparently tried and failed to improve its representation of women with atrocious one dimensional Strong Female Protagonists™
• The 1960s flashback episode where Superman’s Kryptonian father Jor-El becomes a lame, James Dean ripoff biker and fucks Lana Lang’s own ancestor
• Our star Tom Welling providing the acting talents of a headstone with a nice set of dimples sharpied on, for ten straight seasons
• Even the best episode of the show, the brilliant noir pastiche, got derailed before the end of its runtime and is really good for only about the middle 25 minutes of a 45 minute episode
• Jimmy Olsen is a regular character, only to be killed off in a mutual pipe impalement incident with Doomsday, only for the show to then reveal that he was Henry James Olsen all along and whose younger cousin is the real James Olsen so that the Superman story this is ostensibly leading into can have a Jimmy who’s younger than Superman
• The massively overstacked and misused 961 total licensed songs
• Mr. Mxyzptlk, grandiose 5th Dimensional Chaos God and one of the greatest villains of superhero comics, becomes… an Eastern European exchange student with magic luck manipulation powers who fixes high school football games
• Green Arrow started off as a legit adaptation of his lefty self, but that quickly faded away, his run ended with him becoming a government stooge for a Marvel Civil War ripoff. And on a separate alternate universe occasion, he was a landlord. Just to bully his fans, I guess
• A Christmas episode where Lex Luthor takes the final step towards evil out of “love,” because according to an It’s a Wonderful Life ripoff dream sequence his not being evil would cause the woman he loves to die in childbirth on Christmas, while Santa Claus is real and a suicidal drunk
• The witches episode, in which the three female leads get possessed by 14th Century French witches, geek out over their bust sizes (no, that’s not a joke), and stage an evil kegger
• Implying that Darkseid is actively responsible for the creation of the Nazis 
• John Glover, the show’s best actor and the only one able to roll with its abominable dialogue, is reduced to being dubbed over by Darkseid’s goofy voice for his final scenes
• How the show writes Lana and Lex off the show. Lex makes a bomb and only Lana can defuse it and save the hospital or orphanage or whatever, but if she does, it infects her blood to be filled with Kryptonite, making her forever toxic to Clark. She does, then Green Arrow blows up the ambulance Lex is living in, and then Lana leaves and is almost never referenced again
• So in the finale, Lex does come back from the dead and the other Luthors die through extraordinarily stupid methods (also, he gets amnesia that removes literally all eight seasons of his character development). To symbolically show his full takeover of the family company, the LUTHORCORP sign on the front is destroyed by an earthquake to say “LEXCORP” instead. Except, uh… it just sort of ends up being a giant L next to a substantially more giant X made of pink neon wires. Rarely do you see something work so hard to be that half-assed
• The following line of dialogue: “Let’s just say that the Reaper can swing his sickle at me… but I’m beyond DEATH’S STROKE now”
• More than anything else, this is a ten season show that spent five years as a needlessly long Superman origin story and then five years as a Superman story. But because it always saw itself as that Superman origin story, this means its back half is a story inexplicably without Superman. Clark Kent meets and romances Lois Lane, joins the Justice League, fights Lex Luthor and Bizarro and Doomsday, hangs out with the Legion of Superheroes, is targeted by Deathstroke and the Suicide Squad, and his “final test” is Darkseid, but all before being Superman, where he’s instead the “Red-Blue Blur.” The show’s “no tights, no flights” edict—which doesn’t even deign to let Tom Welling wear the full suit in its final scene, just part of it—creates this bizarre sensation where he’s constantly in this holding pattern, experiencing Superman stuff that’s written as a preamble and always feeling like a side character in his own show
• The sheer temerity of the fact that, after ten seasons of publicly defaming Superman’s character, they had the gall to have the final several minutes of the show scored to John Williams’s Superman March

And yet, this already well past its due running joke could go on forever. You could give me three hours of just trashing Smallville and it wouldn’t be enough.

35. Silliest Title for an Eric Roberts Movie Released in 2023

• Amityville Bigfoot (27)
• Spookt (20)
• Top Gunner: America vs Russia (10)
• The Couch: Black Girl Erupted (9)
• Jingle Smells (8)

36. Worst Video Game of 2023

• Hogwarts Legacy (28)
• Lord of the Rings: Gollum (17)
• The Day Before (8)
• Skull Island: Rise of Kong (7)
• Square Enix’s AI Remake of The Portopia Serial Murder Case (7)

37. Worst Song or Album of 2023

• “Try That in a Small Town” by Jason Aldean (55)
• “Rich Men north of Richmond” by Anthony Oliver )19)
• “Mother” by Meghan Trainor (9)
• “It’s the End of the World but It’s a Beautiful Day” by Thirty Seconds to Mars (6)
• “Chris Black Changed My Life” by Portugal the Man (6)

38. Worst Television Season or Miniseries of 2023

• Marvel’s Secret Invasion (43)
• Sam Levinson’s The Idol (35)
• Star Wars: Ahsoka (23)
• Mindy Kaling’s Velma (22)
• South Park: Joining the Panderverse (19)

39. Worst Book, Comic, Novella, or Piece of Prose of 2023

• I’m Unvaccinated and That’s Okay (36)
• The Peacemaker: Nixon: The Man, President, and My Friend by Ben Stein (27)
• The Amazing Spider-Man #26, AKA The Death of Ms. Marvel (5)
• Star Wars: Dark Droids (5)
• DC’s Power Girl by Leah Williams and Eduardo Pansica (3)

40. Worst Film of 2023

• Sound of Freedom (54)
• The Flash (38)
• Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (27)
• Lady Ballers (23)
• The Super Mario Bros Movie (20)
• Five Nights at Freddy’s (16)
• Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (13)
• Wish (12)
• Cocaine Bear (8)
• Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania (8)