Round-up season continues! Read on to remember all the whats that made you say “WHAT?!” in 2015.
Robert Durst confessed that he ‘killed them all’ on The Jinx
Just about everything on The Jinx, the HBO docuseries about skyscraper scion Robert Durst, is surprising, starting with the fact that Durst agreed to be interviewed at all. (Durst was a man long believed to have been involved in/responsible for the disappearance of his first wife; you’d think he might want to keep a low profile.) There was the cool, detached way Durst described dismembering a corpse — limbs and head in garbage bags, torso in a suitcase — that was so disturbing, he explained, his legal team advised him to tell the Texas jury he didn’t remember the details. There was the trail of bodies a person could trace, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, back to Durst.
But nothing was quite as chilling as the way Durst’s body seemed to betray his brain when faced with what looked like particularly damning evidence: Unaware that his mic was still hot post-interview, Durst went into the bathroom and, in his gravely whisper, said: “There it is. You’re caught. What a disaster. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” Considering the fact that Durst is now in prison in New Orleans on a gun charge and, next year, he’ll be transferred to Los Angeles, where he’s been charged with the murder of Susan Berman, and he’s being sued by his first wife’s family for $100 million, which is about all he’s worth, Durst is probably wishing he’d never said yes to participating in The Jinx in the first place.
The biggest pop culture phenomenon of the year was a Broadway show
Hamilton isn’t just a hit on Broadway. It’s a hit on Billboard, where the cast recording debuted at number 12 on the Billboard 200 — the highest debut for a cast album since 1963 — and at number three on the Rap Albums chart, a place that, fair to say, Broadway recordings don’t tend to spend much time. It’s a hit on YouTube, where the delightful #Ham4Ham performances Hamilton mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda coordinates for the crowds hoping to win the lottery for cheap (but fantastic) seats regularly rake in tens of thousands of views. It’s a hit with all your favorite celebrities, even — especially — Beyonce, who wants to swipe King George’s walk from Jonathan Groff. It’s a hit on Twitter, where memes like #ParksandHam (combining the made-for-each-other universes of Parks and Recreation and Hamilton) trend non-stop. It’s a hit with the President, who loved the show so much when he caught it in previews (not quite as ahead of the curve as FLOTUS, who saw the smash when it was still off-Broadway at the Public Theater) he made time to see it again, using a special Monday night performance as a fundraiser for the Democratic Hope Fund. And, in the interest of non-partisanship, it’s a hit with Dick Cheney, too.
Sesame Street moved to HBO
In August, big Big Bird news broke: For the first time in its 45-year history, Sesame Street will air all new episodes exclusively on HBO. The new partnership would save Sesame from financial ruin — Sesame has lost $21.7 million over the last three fiscal years; donations, distribution fees, DVD sales, and licensing for merchandise have all dropped — and enables the children’s education program to produce almost double the number of episodes it usually can offer in a season. But the deal also means new episodes can’t air anywhere but HBO until nine months after they premiere, at which point the episodes will be available on PBS and its member stations for free.
Drake put out the first music video that was made to be a meme
With “Hotline Bling,” Drake gifted the masses the first music video that is made to be meme-ified. The self-aware dancing, the candy-lit backgrounds, the interrupted stretches of Drake just doing Drake: It was designed with the internet in mind. And the internet saw that it was good. As Jon Caramanica put it in the New York Times, “Hotline Bling” is “less a video than an open source code that easily allows Drake’s image and gestures to be rewritten, drawn over, repurposed.” It’s a striking counterpoint to the popular argument that no one cares about music videos these days — insert dated complaint about how MTV doesn’t even play videos anymore here — that proves by virtue of its virality that music fans care about videos just as much as they ever did, if not more, because the videos are an invitation: To sharing, to making gifs, to cutting and pasting and visually remixing and starting all over again.
A second novel of Harper Lee’s was discovered and published (Related: Atticus Finch turned out to be a racist)
Should “discovery” be in quotation marks? The reveal of Lee’s second novel — technically her first; though the story takes place when To Kill a Mockingbird’s little girl protagonist, Scout, is all grown up, Lee wrote the Go Set A Watchman draft before penning her classic — happened under questionable circumstances. The famously reclusive Lee communicates with the press only through written statements, and some close to her doubt whether Lee is in good enough health to know exactly what she’s giving the green light to.
Lee moved into an assisted-living facility after suffering a stroke in 2007; she is essentially deaf and blind. Her closest confidant, her older sister Alice, managed Lee’s affairs, but Alice retired at age 100 and died three years later. Still, a statement from Lee asserts that, while she didn’t realize the draft still existed, she was “surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it.” When the novel was published in July, HarperCollins claimed it was the fastest-selling book in its history. This, in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) the controversy surrounding not just its publication but its contents: GSAW’s Atticus, it turns out, is racist; he even attended a Klan meeting.
Carly Rae Jepson gave us the best pop album of the year
Did you expect the bright young thing behind “Call Me Maybe” to produce one of the most critically-adored (but commercially-ignored) albums of 2015? Her Emotion is the stuff ’80s dreams are made of. Forget about the single and the Tom Hanks cameo in the video; there’s so much more to Jepson than the radio hits, which are adorable and all but don’t even approach what the rest of her album has to offer. In a year when outsider anthems were the order of the day — Alessia Cara’s “Here,” an ode to hating the scene so much you wish you could just go home; Kacey Musgraves’ Pageant Material, in which the country singer-songwriter spends more time defining herself by what she isn’t (“I ain’t pageant material,” “I don’t want to be a part of the good ol’ boys club”) as what she is (“just a dime store cowgirl) — Jepson skips over the fringes to dance hard and make out in the hot, spiked-punch-bowl center of the party.
Netflix doubled-down on unlikely heroines
What do Kimmy Schmidt and Jessica Jones have in common? Tonally, they couldn’t be further apart: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is the brainchild of 30 Rock dream team Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, a wacky, bizarro comedy that was definitely too weird for NBC, while Jessica Jones, plucked from the Marvel canon, is a gritty, grown-up noir about a private eye with some decent superpowers — Jessica is impossibly strong, jumps pretty high, can stop a slow-moving car — and a serious drinking problem. Kimmy dresses in an all-sunshine-all-the-time palette, wearing the sort of yellow-and-pink getups the ripped-jeans-wearing Jessica Jones would probably want to light on fire. But the heroines of these standout 2015 debuts share two vital things: An address (well, two addresses, really: Netflix and New York City) and a violent, traumatizing past.
Kimmy and Jessica are rape survivors, grappling with PTSD and trying to put their lives back together. Kimmy is an “Indiana Mole Woman” who spent most of her life trapped in an underground bunker by an apocalypse-obsessed nutjob. She doesn’t address the sexual violence she experienced directly — save for a quick “yes, there was weird sex stuff in the bunker” line — but the horrors of her past are never totally hidden. (At one point, she wakes from a nightmare to find she’s got her hands throttled around her roommate’s neck; in another scene, she tries to up the ante in a makeout session by shoving her hand into her date’s face, as if to fight him off.) Jessica was victimized by Kilgrave, a supervillain who used his powers of mind control to render Jessica sexually submissive and smiling against her will. These are women who are vulnerable and haunted but defiant, complicated, messy, and tough.
Zero actors of color were nominated for an Oscar
2015 brought us the whitest Academy Awards nominees since 1995. This homogeneity would be appalling at any time, but particularly so this year, when the phenomenal performances in Selma were in contention, as well as the excellent Top Five and Dear White People. In response to the nominations, lawyer and blogger April Reign tweeted her disapproval, along with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. It went viral instantly, with 95,000 tweets per hour bearing the same rallying cry. Neil Patrick Harris, host of this year’s festivities, opened his monologue with, “Tonight we celebrate Hollywood’s best and whitest. Sorry, brightest.”
Over 50 women accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault
2015 has been the year of Cosby’s downfall. In July, a 2005 deposition was released in which Cosby admitted, on the record, to buying Quaaludes with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with. That same month, Cosby was dropped by his agency. In August, the number of women accusing Cosby of sexual assault rose to over 50. Several universities revoked the honorary degrees they’d granted Cosby; Senators Claire McCaskill and Kirsten Gillibrand backed a petition asking the White House to revoke Cosby’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. The latest development? Cosby is countersuing seven of the women who sued him for defamation, citing “emotional distress.”
Brian Williams misremembered getting shot out of the sky
NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams told a story. It was a story he swore happened to him. He was on a helicopter that came under RPG fire. Great story! Except for one thing: It wasn’t true. Williams was on an aircraft about an hour or so behind the helicopter that came under fire. Williams was outed by Lance Reynolds, the flight engineer on the helicopter that actually got shot at. Reynolds posted his response to Williams’ story, which Williams had told multiple times: “Sorry dude, I don’t remember you being on my aircraft. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.”
Williams apologized, but not for lying: He apologized for “making this mistake,” writing in a Facebook post of his own that “I think the constant viewing of the video showing us inspecting the impact area — and the fog of memory over 12 years — made me conflate the two, and I apologize.” As is the law of the internet, #BrianWilliamsMisremembers blew up on Twitter, with users imagining Williams claiming to be in attendance at assorted historical events: The moon landing, the last supper. The man who once numbered among the most trusted in news was suspended from NBC; he returned to a less-prestigious gig at MSNBC, but not before embarking on a very awkward apology tour.
The best breakouts of the summer aired on Lifetime and USA
Welcome to the prestige TV game, Lifetime and USA! With two of the summer’s gutsiest, darkest, most buzzed-about shows, the two networks best known for guilty pleasure made-for-TV movies and lighter, procedural-style stuff (respectively), Lifetime and USA showed they could compete with the premium cable and streaming giants. Lifetime’s UnREAL provided a gripping, sexy, dark exploration of the princess fantasy propagated by The Bachelor and the rest of the reality-romance complex. USA’s Mr. Robot pulled viewers into a paranoid, thrilling alternate reality that was sometimes too similar to our reality for comfort. Both were the youngest-skewing series in each networks’ history.