The Guide newsletter is 100 issues old this week. To mark that little milestone we’ve put together a list of 100 pop-cultural things (films, TV shows, albums, podcasts, games, internet ephemera) that we’ve enjoyed, or which have otherwise lodged themselves in our brains, since the newsletter began. Don’t think of it as a definitive countdown or anything: it’s more a look back at some cultural highs and memorable moments from the past two-odd years. Without further ado:
Severance’s brain-scrambling “Sims meets Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge” opening credits … and just Severance, generally.
Kendrick Lamar promoting 2022’s most anticipated album by dropping a single, The Heart part 5, that wasn’t on said album and was also better than anything that was on it.
Tár, and the return of properly divisive, arguments-on-the-drive-home from-the-cinema movies.
The Forks episode of The Bear, AKA the one where Richie aces a week’s work experience at a fancy restaurant. Secretly the best episode of season two, even though the family dinner table argument episode that preceded it hogged all the attention.
Being back in a sweaty, roiling moshpit after two years of glumly watching videos of them on YouTube.
Spencer, the Kristen Stewart Princess Diana movie, which everyone got wrong: instead of being an underwhelming royal intrigue drama, it was a brilliantly unhinged comedy horror.
The criminally underloved Station Eleven, a drama about a pandemic released at the end of a pandemic and somehow still feelgood TV.
The often hilarious scramble to get Beyoncé/Taylor Swift tickets and the lengths fans went to see them in the flesh (“I guess I’m going to … Warsaw!”).
Football Manager mobile: less a recommendation than a warning. Do not download this game on to your phone. You will become horribly addicted. Your life will be ruined.
The Tubs’ irresistibly catchy album Dead Meat – jangle is back, baby!
That great slow burn sensation of people discovering Squid Game and telling their friends, who loved it and told their friends (granted, assisted by Netflix plastering it all over their homepage).
A three-hour, dialogue-heavy movie about a theoretical physicist making half a billion dollars – damn it Christopher Nolan, you’ve done it again!
The BBC’s breathtaking doc Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, quite possibly the definitive account of The Troubles committed to film.
