In the year 2025...
Stuff that I consumed
The last day of 2025. The last chance to do that thing where you take stock of your life during this trip round the sun. Or at least the popular culture parts of it because beyond that it all gets decidedly bleak. How many times in the 2020’s have we all said, come New Year’s Eve, that next year simply cannot be worse than this one?
And how many times have we been wrong?
To put it simply, “adios 2025, you sucked, don’t let the calendar hit you in the arse on the way out.”
It is still my duty, however, as Hey, Writer Guy to look back on 2025 and try and find the good bits in the trivial pastimes that take up most of my life these days.
Films. I watched way fewer films than I would have wished for, in 2025. I still love the process of going to a film, even if I only ever go to Silky Otter these days – with the seats with the leg-rests, where they bring you food, usually at an important moment in the film, so you can get distracted from the plot by sorting out who among your group ordered the sliders or the chicken, as opposed to just the truffle fries.
Of course, increasingly, I see many of the films I want to see only when they turn up on streaming, thus many of the best films of 2025 I watched sitting at my desk. Ah, the romance of cinema in 2025.
A Real Pain was the first film I saw in 2025 and it set a very acceptable bar for those that followed. Conclave was okay; as was A Complete Unknown. Warfare hooked me in. A House of Dynamite retold the story of Failsafe, one of my all-time faves, so I bought into K Big’s film big time. Train Dreams I quietly loved; Wake Up Dead Man I thoroughly enjoyed. But the one film that won me over was the brilliant insanity of One Battle After Another.
[NB: I managed to miss my viewing window for Sinners, but it is on my must-see list when it streams in 2026, so do not hold that omission against me.]
Music. When it comes to music there is just so much of it about, via many different streams, that I find it hard to settle on anything for any length of time. I listen to music all the time, as I write, so the song that was burnt into my psyche last week inevitably gets relegated the week after.
I try to keep a playlist going of my favourite songs for each calendar year, culling it and editing it as the months fly by. But for every song actually released in 2025 that makes the final list (“Foxes In the Snow” by Jason Isbell; “The Sofa” by Wolf Alice; “The Hudson” by The Favors; Stephen Wilson Jnr’s insane cover of “Something In the Way”; “Boiled Peanuts” by Doechii; and pretty much every track off the Mountain Goats’ Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan album) there are always a bunch of songs from other years that hang around and re-emerge when least expected, forcing their way back into my Top 100 (“Smoko” by The Chats; “Waiting Room” by Fugazi; “The Healing Day” by Bill Fay; and Randy’s “I Love L.A.” because my beloved Dodgers won the World Series in a way that messed with my emotional well-being, big time, at the time.)
Oh and my favourite song title of the year is CMAT’s “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”.
Luckily, when it came to music in 2025, I had Spotify to tell me what I liked and what I am, when it comes to all things musical. According to the Great Wrapped Algorithm I listened to 316 genres. That is way more musical genres than I thought even existed. Gothic Country was apparently my favourite of these 316. I would be intrigued to know what was 316th.
My Listening Age is 69. Even though I’m 64 I’m rather insulted/confused by this, especially when my #1 Spotify song is “Orlando in Love” by Japanese Breakfast, which puts me maybe 40 years over the average Japanese Breakfast fan.
The most concerning thing about the Spotify Wrapped thing, as far as I’m concerned, is that apparently I am a Scout (“always pushing your club forward”) in an entity called Cloud State Society. Given Daniel Ek’s apparent investment into Helsing, an AI-fuelled weapons company seeking to remove humans from battlefield decision-making, I fear that this is setting me up to be conscripted into the frontlines when Skynet becomes self-aware.
Books. I keep a book on my desk – Let the Light Pour In by Lemn Sissay. It is a book of four line morning poems that I randomly dip into, on days when I feel so inclined. It is a great book to have on a desk.
And I finally knocked off Lola In the Mirror by Trent Dalton. It is so good and he is such a great writer and a top bloke that I am almost incandescent with professional jealousy.
TV. I tend to watch TV when I’m not actually writing TV. If I’m busy working, then things pile up that people tell me I need to see. In 2025, with sweet f-all actual writing on-the-go I watched far too much TV.
Way too much TV.
But rather than hammer out a list of the shows that worked for me (and there are many) I want to focus on one show that I kinda felt defined 2025: Pluribus. As someone who tried and failed to get a TV version of The Quiet Earth up and running, I am clearly a bit of a fan of a big concept – especially those of the “what if you were the last human on Earth” variety.
Now I’m not going give away too many spoilers here, but neither am I going to rave unequivocally about Pluribus, because there were times when I found it a hard watch. The problem with such a high-concept show is that the concept inevitably raises a lot of questions. Thus the character in the show who, at the end of the day, represents the viewer, needs to ask the questions the passive viewer cannot. Sometimes this character in Pluribus – Carol – was not asking the questions I wanted answered. This can be very frustrating – especially as Carol is quite a prickly character to start with.
Yes, a lot of this is a creative choice about not wanting dump large slabs of exposition on the audience or give away later plot points, but it is still sometimes frustrating, is all I’m saying. Though nowhere as frustrating as how often the characters in the latest tranche of Stranger Things say lines like “I don’t understand!” or “But this makes no sense!” That’s just plain bad writing in my book.
But I stuck with Pluribus and I was rewarded, not with answered questions, but with a show that will not leave my brain. It seems to reflect perfectly the insane times we are living in. It speaks volumes about the world we are making for ourselves, with our AI friends leading the charge.
Also it is fun to play the game of ‘If Pluribus Was Real, Which Character Would You Be?’ Carol? Zosia? Manousos? If I am honest I’d have to confess to wanting to be Mr. Diabaté – going with the flow, having the time of my life and to heck with the freaky alien people around me.
Which, come to think of it, is what I spent a lot of 2025 trying to do. I didn’t always succeed (who does?) but I’m still here, still chugging on and that’s the main thing.
And surely 2026 cannot be as bad as this year – right?
First of all, The Quiet Earth is probably my favourite Kiwi film of all time, and I would have been overjoyed by a TV version. Though Bruno would certainly be a hard act to follow. (In terms of remakes of classic cinema, have you ever considered a modernised Sleeping Dogs?)
But secondly: "Thus the character in the show who, at the end of the day, represents the viewer, needs to ask the questions the passive viewer cannot. Sometimes this character in Pluribus – Carol – was not asking the questions I wanted answered. This can be very frustrating – especially as Carol is quite a prickly character to start with."
The way I read the show (ugh, what a media studies thing to say) was that it was an intentional choice to have Carol as an off-putting and unreliable - at least in the sense you've described - narrator so that we actually side with the aliens. (Not to mention how much of her behaviour is of the "I did my own research" variety.)
Happy New Year!