Announcing the Winners of the 2025 Peely Awards for the Worst in Pop Culture

1. The Miles MacKenzie Memorial Award for Worst New Character (Wolfman Jew)

• Tilly Norwood: AI actress (42)
• Will Radford, War of the Worlds. Played by Ice Cube at his most “I wonder if they’ve got perogies at craft services” level of checked out, this overbearing NSA agent is exhausting, uninteresting, and only elevates the film in a scene where Ice gets in a fight with a door and loses (19)
• Happosai showing up in Ranma 1/2 (8)
• Pet Xenomorph, Alien: Earth (7)
• The entire crew from All’s Fair (3)
• Morgan Gillory, High Potential (3)

2. The Adam Levine Award for Worst Lyric in a Piece of 2025 Music (Katie)

• “He ah-matized me and opened my eyes Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see His love was the key that opened my thighs,” Taylor Swift, “Wood” (51)
• “Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?,” Taylor Swift, “Cancelled!”  (29)
• “I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it It’s kind of making me wet (Oh),” Taylor Swift, “Actually Romantic” (24)
• Taylor Swift – Father Figure I’ll be your father figure, I drink that brown liquor I can make deals with the devil ‘cos my dick’s bigger (22)
• Taylor Swift – Eldest Daughter I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness (20)

Since Taylor really dominated this award, we wanted to make a bonus Lifetime Achievement Award for two singers who were also nominated but just failed to make the cut:

• “I want you layin’ me down ’til we’re dead and buried,” Alex Warren, “Ordinary” (4)
• “You’re a cinephile I watch Family Guy,” Tame Impala, “No Reply” (2)

3. The Adam Levine: ACTOR Award for Worst Non-Lyrical Line of Dialogue in a 2025 Work (Wolfman Jew)

• “You’re the governor of the state you were born and raised in,” Ella McCay (29)
• I apologize for not giving direct examples, but every single line in War of the Worlds that either extols or decries government surveillance, of which there are many (15)
• Daniel-san’s asinine appropriation of “Cobra Kai never dies” which accompanies one of the single most asinine eleventh hour twists of the year, Cobra Kai Season 6 (3)
• The Lois Lane-Clark Kent debate on “punk,” Superman (3)
• Almost anything from All’s Fair but especially “Never mind me, how are you holding up, you poor discarded c– rag?” (2)

4. The JK Rowling Award for Worst Egregious Celebrity Behavior or Milkshake Ducking (Glinda the Wicked, Pachylad)

• Collective win for the participants in the Riyadh Comedy Festival, the show made by, performed exclusively for, and constructed to whitewash the reputation of Saudi Arabia’s plutocrats (58)
• Neil Gaiman to the point that we may have to rename this award away from the Transphobe of the Molds. Note that many of the allegations came out last year; these are specifically for what we learned in 2025 (50)
• Nicki Minaj going full MAGA in the hopes of getting a pardon for her POS sex offender husband (43)
• Roisin Murphy going from “I love my queer fanbase” (2020) to “oh I uh, stepped into it talking about puberty blockers. I’m gonna shut up now (2023) to using fake and disingenuous statistics to “prove” that transgender and nonbinary people don’t exist (but also, I love my trans fans, even if your identity is a lie and culturally debilitating)” (2025) (19)
• Mizkif getting outed as an abuser and leaving Twitch to stream on Kick (3)

5. The “We Should All Know Less About Each Other” Award for Most Egregious Oversharing (NEPH//QUINLEY//THORNE)

• American Canto, and its press tour/ex-substacking. Turns out a series of extramarital affairs and journalistic malpractice that may have helped catapult RFK Jr. into the position of destroying American healthcare doesn’t inherently make for riveting drama (41)
• Oversharer supreme Quentin Tarantino’s bizarre hate boner against Paul Dano (38)
• Taylor Swift, The Life of a Showgirl (37)
• Ned Fulmer, former “Try Guy” who was canceled after having an affair, returns to the internet with a new podcast, and brings his ex-wife on as his first guest to discuss the aftermath of his infidelity (27)
• Laura Wellington standing up for “estranged adults” everywhere on TikTok until she got to upgrade her tantrums to get a Wall Street Journal puff piece written about her and her screeds against “ungrateful children” (21)

6. The First Night 2013 with Jamie Kennedy Award for Most Hypnotically Unwatchable Trainwreck that Aired Live (Eagle Hand Laundry)

• The New York City Mayoral Debate. While Zohran Mamdani acts like a fucking grown-ass man and puts forth good policies, a rapist who got run out of office on a rail and a vigilante so insane that he was a punchline on The Venture Bros. fight each other over who can be the most racist at him (28)
• The World Cup 2026 draw on Dec. 5, a.k.a. Gianni Infantino’s fetishistic Trumpian lovefest (10)
• The IO Interactive presentation at Summer Games Fest 2025, which tried in vain to sell the audience on Mindseye, featured zero 007 First Light gameplay, and brought out Mads Mikkelsen to advertise Hitman DLC because the show was just that bereft of news (6)
• Oh, lookie here, a nomination for Summer Game Fest 2025 as a whole! Boy howdy, this one was bad. Almost nothing of interest, what good there was getting stretched to the breaking point, a director showing up in a MAGA hat to tell you why all modern shooters are bad, way too many samey games, and dear god, it was two hours of nothing (5)
• Donald Trump’s graph-addled “Liberation Day” vomitation of a speech (5)

7. Most Egregious Corporate Malfeasance (Lily-Bones)

• Electronic Arts getting bought out by the Saudi Royal Family and Donald Trump’s nephew. I could never have imagined EA getting so much worse (35)
• Technically it was only exposed in 2025 and had been going on for years, but Microsoft being one of the largest participants in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, from providing their air force free AI and cloud support to mass spying on Palestinian users of Microsoft Outlook (21)
• TwitchCon and its attempts at “security” for the guests of honor it forced to be there (12)

8. The Self-Catapulting Investors Award for Worst Corporate Self Destruction (Lily-Bones)

• Duolingo going all-in on AI, including firing half their translators, only to have the AI constantly mistranslate and cause users to leave in droves (54)
• It’s been years in the making—which is true of almost all these examples, really—but Elon Musk semi-creating DOGE, mass-firing thousands of American workers, and championing the Trump White House did tons of justified damage to Tesla (33)
• Target going anti-DEI and LGBT, getting boycotted for almost a year and counting because that was their customer base, and losing profits (but never acknowledging why) (31)
• Special mention of new CEO of Paramount getting Netflix to buy Warner Bros, a fuck-up that seemed far beyond the scale of what a CEO of Paramount could do (27)
  • We’d also be remiss without making special mention of Paramount’s plan to become a culturally dominant “pro-MAGA” mass media giant.
• Oh, on that note, the “We Need More Debate”-ification of CBS News and the rise of absolute lunatic Bari Weiss (21)
• Crunchyroll fucking up its subtitles so badly that they may have ignited a new era of piracy and fansubbing (21)

9. Most Ridiculous Publicity Stunt in an Era of Astonishingly Many Ridiculous Publicity Stunts (Lily-Bones)

• The Bezos girlboss space flight (41)
  • And on top of that, Katy Perry turning it into a publicity stunt to announce a new tour and album only for both of them to subsequently flop hard.
• Days before the 2025 Game Awards, Geoff Keighley releases a photo of a giant creepy statue with the caption “Regal Inspiring Thickness.” An augmented reality game reveals it to be in the Mojave Desert, but no one knows what it’s actually referencing. God of War? Tomb Raider? Doom? No, it’s for the next Divinity: Original Sin, which gets a cinematic trailer at TGAs that is disgustingly violent. Some people are offended, some are just taken aback, and some point out that games are getting censored for far less provocative content while this gets to just be at the event because Baldur’s Gate 3 did so well in 2023. The twist is that this controversy gets forgotten days later after Larian’s CEO boasts about the value of AI to a notoriously anti-AI community, and former employees out him as a deeply problematic asshole (28)
• The director of “about to be a flop” Splitgate 2 goes on stage at Summer Games Fest 2025, wearing a fucking “Make FPS Great Again” hat, and whines about how boring modern first-person shooters are and how great his (extremely and openly derivative) first-person shooter is gonna be (13)
• Token nomination for all examples committed by the Trump White House, including misusing Franklin the Turtle and Halo characters to promote ICE and dehumanize immigrants, pardoning convicted major drug trafficker and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez while conducting extrajudicial attacks on Venezuelan boats, using crypto-fascist, Nazi-inspired, Christian nationalist imagery right down to the font choices, and pardoning Changpeng Zhao at the behest of the crypto money sloshing into their funds (13)
• The entire American Eagle “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” campaign and subsequent fallout (12)

However, sometimes this kind of carny barker bullshit doesn’t have to be bad! So In a rare example of one that’s stupid in a fun way, we’d like to bestow Nintendo a Lifetime Achievement Award for releasing fake box art of Donkey Kong Bananza to hide teenage Pauline—a scheme that was almost instantly deflated by Nintendo of Korea accidentally publishing the final art days after the fake one (9)

10. Most Egregious Attempt At Manufacturing Consent (LibraryLass)

• All the “everyday AI” ads that try to convince us people are using it as a tool to puzzle out ordinary, every day decision making in private life, just to carve out a niche nobody asked to be filled (41)
• After spending a bit of time as a “white genocide” propaganda machine, Grok glazing up Musk to the point that he is now canonically a blowjob master and “top 10 piss drinker” in all of history (34)
• Post-Charlie Kirk workplace firings (34)
• The federal government positioning all its policies as necessary to fight a trade war with the United States, regardless of the consequences for labour or the environment (16)
• The Amazon product placement-fueled last third of War of the Worlds… Hell, all of War of the Worlds (4)

11. Fuck It, Let’s Go Five Blades: The Award for Most Disappointing New Product Iteration (Shit-Master Sløtface)

• Google, now that it’s pushing AI generated content as its primary results on searches (46)
• The new, bias removed 60 Minutes (24)
• Gaming hardware across the board going up in price instead of down (1)
• Windows 11 (1)
• Game Pass Ultimate, now $30 a month with less content! (1)

12. Boo, I’m Through with Limu Emu Award for Worst or Most Deeply Annoying Commercial, Trailer, Poster, or Basic Piece of Marketing (Glinda the Wicked, Tigercat919)

• Those Matthew Mccoughnehey/Woody Harrelson Salesforce ads trying to convince us you can’t get basic plumbing service unless it’s powered by AI (31)
• The anti-Mamdani, pro-Cuomo ads that used AI (19)
• Sorry Walton Goggins, but your Wal-Mart ads are incredibly annoying, even before you became the Grinch (18)
• American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign (15)
• Ella McKay being promoted as “Lisa Simpson’s new favorite film” (10)

13. Screw You Algorithm Award for Most Offensive and Insulting Ad Recommendations You Received in 2025 (SadClown)

• Agnew getting “ICE recruitment shit” (54)
• Ever since getting illegally fired, How to Get Away with Mordor getting ads to join ICE, write a collective letter praising the President for “cutting” spending, or donate to organizations that their former department used to fund (35)
• Wolfman Jew getting an ad from the Israeli government on YouTube that amounted to “all that genocide you’ve seen and read about? No, dawg, that’s totally not happening, and you’re wrong to think it is. End of video” (26)
  • Because I run these shows and have no interest in pretending to be unbiased, I get to add whatever bonus stuff I want, and in an act of pure bias I’m also referencing the other commercial I nominated: the ad for conservative Democrat Josh Gottheimer, who was considered the candidate to beat in the New Jersey Gubernatorial primary. It’s an AI version of himself as a child boxing an AI Donald Trump. It was horrible, and I hate it, and the only pleasure I got out of it was seeing it disappear from the airwaves the moment his numbers started to tank.
• Non-American Boredatwork getting a month’s worth of ads from Kristi Noem saying something along the lines of “don’t try to go to the US illegally because you and everyone else you know doing it will be deported” (12)
• Merve getting “ads trying to get [him] to donate to cop charities. Fuck the pigs, now and forever.” And he ain’t wrong (12)

14. The “At Least Deus Ex Had Rad Fashion” Award for Most Persistent Reminder that We’re Suffering under Late Capitalism and There’s No Escape (Merve)

• “Prompt Thieves” infighting in the AI community (37)
• The continued existence of X, né Twitter (26)
• The fact that the easiest way to make money these days is to call a child the N word and then set up a gofundme (23)
• Top-down mandated AI implementation in every goddamn industry without any interest in figuring out its value or use beforehand, which means we’re well into the “add a clock to the oven and call it a new thing” phase of the tech’s life cycle (18)
• A bill to end Daylight Saving Time has been passed, our current president has promised to end it, and YET. AND YET (17)

15. Most Craven Company to Sell Out Employees for AI-Generated Slop, and the Most Mealy-Mouthed Excuse for Doubling Down (uh, clem, Shit-Master Sløtface)

• Disney’s absolutely asinine deal with OpenAI (45)
• The Canadian government appointing a minister of artificial intelligence. By the way, said minister, Evan Solomon, was fired from the CBC several years ago for using the connections he had forged in his career as a journalist to broker art sales. One of his clients: current prime minister Mark Carney (21)
• My career has been in graphic design but so many of those jobs have disappeared throughout the industry (13)
• Speaking of Disney from earlier, them and Epic Games (whose president is openly salivating over the prospect of replacing his workers with computers) adding Darth Vader to Fortnite but specifically one that used dynamic AI acting. It took minutes at most for people to get the soulless James Earl Jones simulacrum to vomit slurs and conspiracies, and all for technology that exists to fire actors (11)
• Wizards of the Coast, a standard bearer for corporate malfeasance at the Peely’s (8)
• UMG, Sony and Warner (so companies in this case) striking a deal with AI music streaming service Klay to let it use their shit (8)

16. Most Obnoxious Defense or Most Egregious Attempt at Getting You To Use AI (Wolfman Jew, Shit-Master Sløtface)

• “Let’s Focus on What Art Does, Not How It Was Made.” We’re not going to include AI art here as an example (you can view it here if you dare), but this is a sanctimonious as fuck image about how AI artists face unfair prejudice because… prompts let them spend less time making posters to advertise soup kitchens? I guess? It took me a few minutes to try and explain this, and I feel an onset headache over it already (44)
• “My Favorite Actress Is Not Human” because an AI actress will be “a virgin on-screen” who can’t cause controversies (34)
• Google searching in general (29)
• Anthropic CEO guts an over 30 gay gamer Discord by forcing an AI chatbot on it, disregards a member poll by calling it “mob rule,” allows it unfettered access to all channels on the server, and justifies it by saying they’re bringing a new kind of sentience into existence (27)
  • Actually, in general, it didn’t get nominated in a more general sense, but we gotta talk about all the tech leaders acting as though prompts and LLMs and shit are birthing actual intelligence. When they’re really affirmation machines, which is exactly why AI may not be good for you, and it is definitely not good for the environment, but it is good for your boss.
• Fuckin’ Microsoft stuffing those damn Copilot popups into Office 365 all the damn time. Dickbags crammed yet another useless chat bot into it (23)

17. Most Bone-Headed the Worst UI Change to an Existing App, Site, Game, or Other Piece of Software that Didn’t Involve Generative AI (Girard)

• Microsoft realizes that “oh shit, dude, Xbox isn’t selling; we gotta go all in on Game Pass,” floods its entire gaming UI with constant, endless, overwhelming pitches to get you to buy its increasingly costly and decreasingly interesting service (23)
• Instagram putting the “Add Caption” interaction over the “Your Story” button you need to press to post it (20)
• Yahoo adding an achievement reward system to reading emails (17)
• Microsoft making it essentially impossible to install Windows 11 on a new computer without an Internet connection and a Microsoft account (17)
• Latest iOS update ruining legibility with “Liquid Glass” (7)

18. Fuck You, Limbaugh, Ya Still Dead Award for Most Infuriating Example of the Existence of Actual, Far Right-Driven and Far Right-Approved Cancel Culture After Decades of Conservatives Controlling Politics Through the Nonexistent Threat of Anti-Conservative Political Correctness. (Wolfman Jew, Tigercat919)

• Oklahoma University firing an instructor for correctly giving a student a failing grade because the Evangelical Christian student went to the media about it (69)
• CBS cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert because Trump got mad at Colbert (53)
• Kneecap and Bob Vylan getting dropped from bills and their visas revoked for pro-Palestine statements. And that doesn’t even count the legal harassment, with months-long police investigations into both acts and a Canadian MP’s statement that Kneecap were banned from Canada which the Border Services Agency denied (39)
• Disney going out of their way to cut trans characters from cartoons. While some degree of conservative posturing was probably expected after Trump won, and while Disney has always deferred to rightwing politicians, this was a pretty clear indication that they’re willing to comply in advance (30)
  • Bones note: The two trans censorships referenced in the nomination were last year and were even covered by us last year, but they are worth mentioning again as long as we include something more recent like the Elio censorship.
• Online video game storefronts start taking down adult games—ones made disproportionately by female and queer designers and developers—at the behest of an Australian rightwing campaign to pressure American card companies into denying services for entirely legal products. This is a terrifying canary in the coal mine for the banning of entire services or industries that don’t follow conservative orthodoxy, but it’s also flagrantly disingenuous when A) many of the games targeted are not nearly as provocative as they’re described and B) the industry mainstream has plenty of far, far more egregious games that are celebrated for their excesses. I mentioned that grisly Divinity trailer a few categories ago, and that aired at a family-friendly event (28)

19. The HBO Max(imum) Revolving Door Award for Worst Rebranding (Shit-Master Sløtface)

• The Trump-Kennedy Center The Trump The Kennedy Center for the Arts (70)
• Cracker Barrel’s logo removing both the barrel and the cracker (47)
• While “HBO Max” is obviously the better title, Warner Bros. spending tens of millions to change it back after already having spent tens of millions to change it to “Max” is, uh, indicative (35)
• Paramount’s desire to both rebrand itself as an explicitly “pro-MAGA” institution and the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world (32)
• Apple renaming its premium original content offering of Apple TV+ to just “Apple TV”, which is also the name of their physical set top box, as well as the app you access both the aforementioned original content and purchased content and the subscribed channels / services you signed up through Apple (26)

20. Worst Non-Gambling/Sports Betting Aspect of Sports, From the Most Ill-Advised Sports Trade to the Most Disingenuous Sportswashing to the Most Disreputable Behavior: Presented by Bet365 Sportsbook! Enter the Promo Code “garbageape” for a Special Bonus (Tigercat919, comradequestion)

• The FIFA Peace Prize (53)
• Former 400m WR holder and BBC sports commentator Michael Johnson attempted to form a new track & field league this year, offering massive prize money and even lodging to athletes in an effort to “save” the sport. Turns out he didn’t have the $31 million he claimed to have invested, the league is now in bankruptcy proceedings, and some athletes are out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Johnson continued putting on massively expensive meets after his key investor declined to put forward more money, and from the bankruptcy filings he was probably also getting fleeced. The bankruptcy declaration means that some athletes may also *lose* money that’s already paid out (25)
• Mark ‘Butt Fumble’ Sanchez, an NFL game commentator and former NY Jet quarterback, drunkenly attacked a guy in Indianapolis and was stabbed in self-defense. Initial news about “Sanchez in hospital after stabbing” quickly shifted from well wishes to “what the fuck??” after details began to emerge (21)
• Aaron Rogers’ nuttiness being swept under the rug the moment he starts winning football games in Pittsburgh (20)
• The Luka Doncic Trade and its aftermath (19)
• Multi-millionaire team owners getting into a tizzy when local governments don’t want to spend egregious amounts of public funds on new stadiums. So they threaten to move the team elsewhere (17)

21. The Gourmet, Gourmand, Goofus Award for Most Exhaustively Omnipresent Food Trend or Poor Culinary Innovation of 2025 (Spice Weasel, Eagle Hand Laundry)

• Throwing protein powder on food, like popcorn, and calling it a day (31)
• The actual flavors and textures are good, but dear lord Dubai chocolate is everywhere (27)
• Hot honey, especially on pizza. The person who nominated this lives near a brewpub whose only food offerings are pizzas with hot honey on them. It feels like hot honey is filling a void that Baconmania left a couple of years ago (22)
• Matcha isn’t bad at all, but its oversaturation in the food industry is too much (12)
• The suspicious proliferation of cast iron content across FoodTube, including channels that allegedly don’t do ads (8)

22. The Most “This Doesn’t Exist” Pop Culture that at Best Nobody Asked for and at Worst Many People Asked to Not Happen (Kim Cardassian, MacCrocodile)

• Monster: the Ed Gein Story. What if Ed Gein was actually a hot guy, and what if you could blame all his problems on women, including Christine Jorgensen, whom he never interacted with? Wouldn’t that be fun? (38)
• The Electric State, the Russo Bros.’ Chris Pratt movie for Netflix that’s trying to be like eight sci-fi films at once but mostly settles on “generic action movie” (28)
• There was a Smurfs movie with Rhianna that came out this year (27)
• WWE going to Saudi Arabia, again (19)
• Irrespective of the final result, the Anthony Joseph v. Jake Paul boxing match (15)
• Bulldozing the White House Rose Garden and replacing it with a concrete slab and patio furniture (15)

23. No, It’s the Children Who Are Wrong… No Seriously. They Actually ARE Wrong, I’m not Joking Award for Unpopular Pop Culture Item of 2025 That Deserves Better (Tigercat919)

• The Toxic Avenger, so unpopular it was actually finished in 2023! (20)
• Black Bag. A fantastic thriller, killer cast, short running time and one of Soderbergh’s best (10)
• Kiss of the Spider Woman. It wasn’t a great adaptation but someone should have marketed it. JLo could have done a fraction of the self promo that Grande and Erivo did (7)
• Dear Me, I Was… (3)
• Leigh Whannel’s Wolf Man movie (3)

24. Pluribus Award for Best TV Series on a Streaming Service You Don’t Have (LoveWaffle)

• Poker Face (23)
• Pluribus (16)
• Heated Rivalry (12)
• Foundation (4)
• The Studio (4)
• Beavis & Butthead Season 3 (4)

25. Most Painful, Premature, and Gosh Darnit, Straight-Up Unfair Cancellation of a Serialized Work in 2025 (LoveWaffle, Wasp)

• Again, Poker Face (31)
• Boots (11)
• The Wheel of Time (10)
• The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (7)

26. The Two Jakes Award for Most Unnecessary Sequel (Glinda the Wicked)

• Wicked: For Good (34)
• Jurassic World: Rebirth (21)
• Happy Gilmore 2 (21)
• Blue Bloods sequel show Boston Blue (11)
• Dexter: Resurrection (8)

27. The “Please Touch Grass” Award for Worst Fan Behavior (Glinda the Wicked, Pachylad)

• Repeated instances of fans grabbing, touching, and groping celebrities (41)
• Most people are not licensed psychologists or doctors. So please stop commenting on Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s personal appearance or say they act weird during interviews because they are passionate about the movie they are in (18)
• The Dropout (né Collegehumor) subreddit regular that was found making three creepshot / hornyposting subreddits dedicated to male, female, and nonbinary members / guests (18)
• Memelord Minecraft Moviefans making a ruckus in theaters, as encapsulated by… CHICKEN JOCKEY!  (17)
• Snyderbros hoping the WB buyout will result in Snyder being put back in charge of DC (12)

28. “The Torment Nexus Hit the Goddamn Pentagon!!” Award for Worst and Weirdest Analysis, Take, or Active Misrepresentation of a Piece of Media Across the Grand Miasma of Cultural Discourse (Glinda the Wicked, Pershing 48)

• “Fictional characters cannot consent to you watching them have sex” (60)
• “Let’s use AI to add a Ghibli style sheen to people being dehumanized and brutalized” (30)
• “Dakota’s hair on The Materialists must have been stylized to evoke the image of a hijab, right?” (27)
• Peter Thiel on how Watchmen and One Piece are actually about a bunch of gibberish he’s obsessed with (23)

29. The “Are you Fucking Kidding me?” Award for the Most Bad-Faith, Brainworms-y, or Otherwise Most Viscerally Nonsensical Argument or Discourse that did not Originate from the Trump White House (Lilburne, Katie)

• The Anti-Defamation League defending Musk for doing a Nazi salute (57)
• Ezra Klein, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” (52)
• “Anyone who’s anti-AI is discriminating against disabled people” (49)
• Ms Rachel being accused of antisemitism and being sponsored by Hamas because she showed sympathy for Palestinian children (45)
• “My Favorite Actress Is Not Human,” an article explaining how we need AI actors because they don’t have sex or write inflammatory posts (33)

30. The Chuck Klosterman Memorial Award for Worst Thinkpiece (Merve). DOUBLE WINNER!!

• David Brooks saying we shouldn’t care about the Epstein Files, a few days before we learned he was in them (49)
• “My Favorite Actress Is Not Human,” by Peely’s sweep machine Tyler Cowen (49)
• The aforementioned “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politi-nope, can’t finish this without telling Ezra Klein to absolutely go fuck himself (46)

31. Best Moment That’s Just Deeply Satisfying to the Primordial Lizard Part of Our Brains

• Sinners: the time-shifting “I Lied to You” musical number, Michael B. Jordan killing a metric ton of Klan goons, the best The Thing-style blood test ever put to screen, and the en masse VampIrish jig to “Rocky Road to Dublin”
• Superman: Superman beats up Lex Luthor’s entire army in less time than it took you to read this sentence, Krypto the Super-Dog subsequently beats the stuffing outta Lex, Mr. Terrific has “fun, fun, fun,” Hawkgirl gives the suspiciously evocative President Ghurkos exactly what he deserves, and the realization that this Superman was smart and proactive enough to get rid of all the Kryptonite well before the movie started
• Donkey Kong Bananza: every single time you press the “punch” button, and “literally every” other moment, but especially King K. Rool’s triumphant return
• Hollow Knight: Silksong: Fucking up a boss or gauntlet that has been holding you in place for like a week as well as several notable boss fights, among them Widow, Phantom, Sister Splinter, the Cogwork Dancers, and Skarrsinger Karmelita
• KPOP Demon Hunters: the opening number, “Your Idol,” and SungWon Cho IS Abby, the K Pop Demon boy so named for his abs
• Peacemaker: the Foxy Shazam boat concert that led to a real life Foxy Shazam / Nelson reunion, and showing the heel turn of the DCU’s apparent big bad through a multiversal, coke-fueled montage set to Steel Panther’s “Fucking My Heart in the Ass”
• Deltarune: beating the Roaring Knight, Noelle standing up to her mom
• Avatar: Fire and Ash: space whales tear shit up (again)
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii: Installing laser cannons on your pirate ship
• Wicked: For Good: Madame Morrible’s fantastical comeuppance
• Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake: a powerful, fun, and exciting queer revelation
• One Battle After Another: the climactic car chase
• Weapons: the last ten or so minutes
• Stranger Things: Will Byers finally gets one over on the baddies
• The Wedding Banquet remake: in the throes of his desperation, one of the main characters vows to “play all the Kingdom Hearts games, even the mobile one” that was delisted like five years ago
• Heated Rivalry: All the delightful intimacy
• Blue Prince: finally making it into Room 46
• Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider: Tojima “Transforms” Into a Kamen Rider
• The Toxic Avenger: two goons shooting themselves to death after a failed seduction attempt by JJ
• The Ranma 1/2 remake: Ukyo showing up
• Best of the Worst: Every time Josh Robert Thompson (Geoff on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson) broke out his Arnold Schwarzenegger impression in that one episode where they watch videos about evangelical agitator James Dobson crying about pornography, the pseudoscientific health benefits of drinking urine, Arnold terrorizing the city of Rio, and Arnold as Boss Nass as Watto
• Kirby Air Riders: every time in City Trial where you grab so many power-ups that you literally can’t control your car and just rocket around like a maniac
• You Have Billions Invested in Generative AI: Telling Noam Chomsky to fuck off
• Marty Supreme: the hilarious, insane, and hilariously insane opening credits that are set to video of a sperm fertilizing an egg
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Using Percée on a Marked target in Virtuose stance
• Sonic Racing Crossworlds: getting to build super edgy and extreme deathmobiles with spikes and blades and other sharp and dangerous things and then having literal children like Tails or Cream or Charmy drive them
• Last Bullet (Lost Bullet 3): The big train fight
• Road to Empress: exciting video game-ass UI
• Anthony Joseph’s jaw-shattering wailing away at Jake “why is this asshole still famous?” Paul
• Céline Dion Grinching it up on Instagram

32. Worst Pre-2025 Pop Culture that You Experienced for the First Time This Year

• Alien vs. Predator: Requiem: the darkest movie I’ve ever seen!… Because it’s literally so dark that it’s impossible to see anything in it! (24)
• My Friend Peppa Pig (11)
• Garden of Words by Makoto Shinkai (6)
• Project Hail Mary (6)
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3. The movie, not the game (5)

33. Worst Pop Culture Object of 2024 that Wasn’t a Winner or Runner-Up in Last Year’s Peely’s (Wolfman Jew). DOUBLE WINNER!!

• Sausage Party: Foodtopia, a.k.a. the Amazon Prime prequel series to… Sausage Party (19)
• IF, the weird John Krasinski muppet-y thing. Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a winner or runner-up. Turns out titles that generic are hard to search for! (19)
  • Bones note: it’s Capital I Capital F because it stands for “Imaginary Friends.”
• Dexter: Original Sin, a.k.a. the “what if Dexter was Young Sheldon” spinoff that got replaced by the other dumb Dexter spinoff (17)
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard (8)
• Hundreds of Beavers (which, for whatever it’s worth, your host thought was pretty alright. But let vox populi rule the day!) (6)

34. Silliest Title for a Pop Culture Work Released in 2025, Non-Eric Roberts Division (Wolfman Jew)

• Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX (35)
• Local H choosing to title the re-recording of their debut album, Ham-Fisted, as Re-Fisted (18)
• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (17)
• Fuck My Son! (17). And no, that title is not metaphorical.
• Straight Until He Kissed Me (16)
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World (13)
  • We would also like to reference Nintendo’s trend of ridiculous “Nintendo Switch 2 Edition” titles, which show that rigorous factual accuracy doesn’t inherently make for sexy marketing.

35. Silliest Title for an Eric Roberts Work Released in 2025

• Trash’s Revenge: Return of the Living Dead Universe (24)
• Yard Saleing (12)
• The Arkansas Pigman Massacre, which I spent the entire week erroneously reading as “The Arkansas Pilgrim Massacre” (10)
• Holiguards Saga: The Portal of Force (8)
• Wrongful Death 2: Bloodlines (8)
• MMA Cop (8)

36. Worst Video Game of 2025

• MindsEye (18)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization VII (14)
• Fire Emblem Shadows (9)
• Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (6)
• Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game (4)
• Splitgate 2 (4)

37. Worst Song or Album of 2025

• “Ordinary” by Alex Warren (21)
• Cody Johnson’s piss-poor cover of “Traveling Soldier” that somehow became a hit (20)
• The Life of a Showgirl by Taylor Swift (20)
• Mystical Magical by Benson Boone (12)
• Based On a True Story by Will Smith (11)

38. Worst Television Season or Miniseries of 2025

• The Baldwins. Even if Alec Baldwin hadn’t killed someone, this would be a bad look (24)
• The Last of Us Season 2 (18)
• Universal Basic Guys makes Family Guy look like vintage Looney Tunes (15)
• Alien: Earth (12)
• All’s Fair (11)
• The Residence (10)
• It: Welcome to Derry (10)

39. Worst Book of 2025

• American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi (59)
• Original Sin by Jake Tapper (37)
• Good Game No Rematch by Mike Drucker (12)
• Fox by Joyce Carol Oates (8)
• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (5)

40. Worst Film of 2025

• War of the Worlds (52)
• Captain America: Brave New World (39)
• Star Trek: Section 31 (31)
• Tron: Ares (24)
• Jurassic World: Rebirth (19)
• HIM (18)
• F1 (17)
• Collective nomination for the two latest movies in the edgy public domain serial killer “Poohniverse”: Bambi: The Reckoning and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (16)
• The Materialists (15)
• A House of Dynamite (13)