Sean Lemme

I started blogging as a way to lazily pass my high school senior project and somehow I've kept doing it for more than half my life

Sean’s Top 10 Movies of 2024

It’s only been a few days but it’s become abundantly clear that our disorienting four-year weird period is definitely over and we’re back in the shit. I don’t know how I’ll remember 2024 in the years to come, but right now it’s the little things I treasure. Thinking back to John and I laughing at the title card reveal at the end of the trailer for AfrAId. An undeserved accusing look from Nancy during Dune: Part 2 because I definitely was not asleep. Being called a fucking asshole by an old man for sneaking back into Cinerama to look for something my dad dropped after a screening of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Overdosing on the Babes-inspired Sour Patch Kids popcorn at Nosferatu with Colin. These are the experiences that make life worth living.

All I know is that no one can take those memories away from me. And if you’re feeling down, at times like these, I am reminded of the immortal words of Stacker Pentecost:

Today. Today, at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other. Today there is not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone. Not today. Today we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them! Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!

In conclusion, I guess I have to pick an audience to represent? Because John said he fights for the freaks and perverts and then Colin wrote he’s here for the thoughtful misfits. Does that leave for me the normies? The good-time Charlies? The kind of person M. Emmet Walsh would call a “typical bastard”? Maybe, except those nut jobs loved Deadpool 3 and that shit gives me a migraine just thinkin’ about it.

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Sean’s Top Five Shows of 2024

Well, congratulations Hollywood, you did it. You’ve fractured the landscape of television so completely that if you’re not watching something in the same room as someone else, no one has any idea what the hell you’re talking about anymore. And it’s not just about community: TV criticism has all but been killed off and with so many streaming services now (and the crackdown on password sharing), it’s too expensive to even try to keep up with everything anyway, so the sense of urgency when it comes to shows is just gone. It’s so bad, we decided to do top fives this year instead of 10 because this has become a futile and stupid gesture. And the saddest thing of all? While this is all happening, creatives are still making a lot of good TV, arguably too much good stuff!

I have got a long list of shows that are supposed to be great that I just never made time for, shows like Bad Monkey, The Diplomat, Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show, Shrinking, Silo, and Slow Horses. And another list of franchise shows I definitely, actively want to watch like The Acolyte, Fallout, House of the Dragon, Penguin, Rings of Power, and Skeleton Crew. But fuck it, they just never happened for me in 2024 because I was too busy watching One Piece at the time or I wasn’t subscribed to the right streaming service at the time or I was still too burnt out on meaningless Star Wars prequel movies stretched out into miniseries.

Can we come back from this? I sure hope so. I still haven’t given up on my watchlist. Maybe we just need everyone in America/the world to start a blog and do annual top tens? Or suddenly all try to care about the Emmys at least as much as we care about the Oscars? Maybe putting some effort into thinking about the media we consumed all year instead of just letting an algorithm tell us (or an AI in Spotify Wrapped’s case) could be good for us all? In the meantime, let’s at least try to keep in mind that while the era of peak TV might be over, that doesn’t mean the medium has been reduced to just reality junk and mindless reruns.

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Sean’s Top 10 Albums of 2024

To paraphrase Colin, while TV and movies were dealt another brutal blow by the strikes last year, the music industry felt fully back in swing as we closed out the first half of this decade. Finally, it seemed like there was more going on than songs about isolation during the pandemic or leftover relics from the 2010s! Perhaps not coincidentally, this corresponded with era of girl pop hitting its zenith (or perhaps merely just new heights) with Spotify’s data showing that women dominated the lists of most-streamed artists, songs, and albums of 2024. On top of that, long-dormant artists like Camera Obscura and Jamie xx showed up with pretty good new albums and others, like The Smile and Charley Crockett, couldn’t help but put out multiple complete LPs. I’ll just say it, 2024 was an embarrassment of riches!

But here’s what’s freaking me out: at the end of every year, I scoop up a bunch of albums from other “best of” lists and cram them into my ears as fast as possible so I can make the actual, definitive, best top 10 list on the Internet (not really, usually I crap out and make a big apologetic post). The thing is, at some point in late 2023, I definitely did stream The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and yet not only did Chappell Roan *not* make last year’s list, I totally forgot about her until the Guts World Tour turned this sleeper hit into a smash.

Of course, the second time around I fell in love with Chappell Roan like everyone else, and her follow-up single “Good Luck, Babe!” was 100% my #1 summer jam, despite allegations of it being a BRAT summer. But there are precious months where I could have been way more on top of my shit instead of wasting my time on the mental gymnastics that could justify THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT as really good, actually. So what does that mean? What lesson have I learned from this humbling experience? Listen to new music more times, I guess. Don’t be a boring old guy? Oh no, more on that later!

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Shocktober: Agatha All Along

Agatha All Along

Miniseries
Original Air Date:
September 18–October 30, 2024

Note: I’m writing this before Agatha All Along‘s two-part finale, which comes out later this week. Marvel shows are notorious for dropping the ball right at the end, so keep that in mind. Maybe everyone will be really mad at this show tomorrow!

Three years after WandaVision, Agnes of Westview is a crime noir series about Agnes O’Connor (Kathryn Hahn), a surly detective working a Jane Doe case in Westview, New Jersey. At least, that’s what The Scarlet Witch wanted Agnes to believe when she escaped the hex at the end of WandaVision. Actually, Agnes is a performance that the witch Agatha Harkness is being forced to perform and the rest of the town humors because what else are they going to do. Her running around town with a hose nozzle in a holster isn’t hurting anyone. But all good things must come to an end, and a mysterious goth teen (Joe Locke) appears and helps wake Agatha up from the spell. The teen wants Agatha’s help finding the Witches’ Road, a trial that rewards witches what they desire most, which Agatha has survived once before. She’s not interested, but that’s when the green witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) shows up and tries to kill her.

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Shocktober: “The 20’s”

This Is Us: “The 20’s”

Season 2, Episode 6
Original Air Date:
October 31, 2017

Unlike most of the shows I’ve watched this Shocktober, I actually do have some familiarity with This Is Us, albeit for dumb reasons. Earlier this year, my YouTube algorithm started recommending I watch clips of the most emotional scenes from this series that ended in 2022 and I obliged the machine, as I am wont to do. Watched out of order and context, I saw enough to pick up the gist of the show and it’s characters. It’s a show about three siblings and their parents. My understanding is that every week, This Is Us would employ a technique now popularized by our diabolical criminal ex-president, “the weave,” to juxtapose pivotal moments in the lives of this family across decades. So, for example, you’ll see the siblings fight over something as kids and then support each other in the modern day, having learned some lesson from their great dad or whatever. Basically it is a well-oiled machine designed to make you cry. But does that actually make for good TV?

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Shocktober: “Search and Seizure”

The Practice: “Search and Seizure”

Season 2, Episode 7
Original Air Date:
October 25, 1997

And now for a little more from the twisted mind of David E. Kelley. Kelley created The Practice as a rebuttal to his Doogie Howser buddy Steven Bochco’s L.A. Law, which Kelley felt overly romanticized the American legal system. If Halloween special “Search and Seizure” is anything to go by, Kelley massively succeeded in making an unglamorous legal drama. In this episode alone the lawyers are sexually assaulted, witness an illegal arrest, bribed by drug dealers, fail at subverting Roe v, Wade, and forced a moral dilemma where they have to choose between faith, ethics, and the law. It’s quite a lot and hard to imagine how this evolves into the borderline comedy of Boston Legal by the end.

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Shocktober: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

Xena: Warrior Princess: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

Season 2, Episode 4
Original Air Date:
October 21, 1996

Xena always seemed like a logical next step for me after I finished Buffy and Angel all those years ago, but I never made the leap. In fact, all I really knew about Xena was she uses a metal frisbee as a weapon, she yells in a distinct way when she does finisher moves, and the opening credits are edited like a movie trailer. Oh and it’s as gay as a show on… WB? USA Network? Whatever this was on was allowed to be in the mid-Nineties. Which, if “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is anything to go off of, is pretty gay.

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