Reflecting on 2023
My weird, wonderful "gap year"
There are few things I love more than the reflective refresh of January. So before I start diving into the content I have planned for 2024, here’s a little look back at my wild, weird 2023.
2023 marked my tenth year as a professional critic, and it was also the first time I considered giving up the job all together. Like most people, I’ve found the past few years pretty tumultuous and anxiety-inducing. But for me, that all came to a head at the end of 2022, when I lost my swanky contract gig with FOX Digital and suddenly had to grapple with just how different my career looked from its pre-pandemic state.
I no longer had a connection with The A.V. Club, the site that served as my main home for nine years. I could no longer count on Twitter, which was once my biggest networking platform for finding new work. I’d driven myself into some hardcore burnout trying to run a podcast while building a new vertical from the ground up. And to top it all off, a close family member was hit by a car on New Year’s Day. Everyone was okay, thankfully, but helping them through a five-day hospital stay and several weeks of recovery was quite a dramatic way to start the new year.
I needed a break, and for the first time since I started my A.V. Club internship back in spring 2013, I gave myself one. I put my podcast on hold. I stopped keeping up with movies and TV shows. I took a full six months off from writing. I taught myself to embroider and started obsessively binging the back catalogue of the Boy Meets World podcast, Pod Meets World. (Shawn Hunter forever!)
In a lot of ways it was great. I desperately needed the time off and it inspired me to do fun, impulsive things, like visit Disneyland with my sister and take a road trip from St. Louis to New York with my parents. But looking back, I can also see just how manic and unmoored I felt during that time. I was living without a steady source of income, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be hired to write criticism again, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to. The past decade of my career had felt like climbing a (sometimes wonky) staircase in a vaguely upward trajectory. Suddenly I was standing on a cliff with no bridge in sight.
I have two people to thank for getting me across that chasm. One is my old A.V. Club colleague Myles McNutt, who, probably more than he realizes, tossed me a life raft by inviting me to cover genre television on his excellent TV criticism site, Episodic Medium. Writing weekly recaps for a supportive audience was the perfect way to ease myself back into the world of criticism; to remind myself that even with a six-month break, I still had the muscle memory to write a review. And, more importantly, to remember that I really enjoyed doing it—even when covering a show as terrible as Secret Invasion. (And eventually better shows like Loki and Doctor Who.)
The other person I have to thank for my career revival is, unexpectedly enough, Taylor Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, who for some inexplicable reason said yes when I pitched her on the idea of covering the Eras Tour as a way to launch a Substack about girl culture. “I'm willing to take the chance and hope it helps you kick off your new career path,” she wrote before sending me off to see night two in Kansas City. And I know she’s a good publicist because not only is she managing Taylor’s career, she’s apparently managing mine as well.
Without that vote of confidence from Tree, I sincerely doubt I would’ve followed through on launching Girl Culture—my longtime daydream of a way to continue and expand the work I used to do at my old A.V. Club column, When Romance Met Comedy. But I’m so glad I did. Though the idea of building a new audience in our overcrowded media landscape is terrifying, I was absolutely blown away by the initial support I received, both in people signing up to receive the newsletter and in offering to pay for it as well. While the money I make here isn’t anywhere close enough to live on (yet!), my total 2023 Girl Culture earnings wound up covering a month of my rent, which is a huge deal in an industry where I’m often scraping together a living one $100 assignment at a time.
Equally importantly, it’s been a huge mindset shift to have an online space that truly belongs to me. Where I can choose what I cover, and own my own writing in a literal sense, which has never been the case before this. For the past decade, I’ve fallen into the trap of defining my success based on the prestige of the sites I write for. Logging my first Girl Culture review on my official Rotten Tomatoes page helped me realize that I’m the one bringing value and expertise to my work, no matter where it’s published.
Of course, given Substack’s recent refusal to take a stand against Nazis, it’s difficult to uniformly praise the platform at the moment. I completely understand and respect anyone who’s stepping away from the site, either as a writer or a reader. But in a sea of imperfect options, I’m choosing to remain here for now—although I’ll let you know if that changes.
After getting back into a groove with writing over the summer, the second half of my 2023 was all about balance. My weird unemployment era at least gave me a blank slate to start rebuilding my career more intentionally. And with that mindset shift, I sought out higher paid consulting work, reconnected with old editors at places like Block Club Chicago and The Daily Beast, and got (somewhat) better at saying “no” to assignments I didn’t have the bandwidth to write—without feeling like I’d never be offered work again.
Personally, I also worked on rebuilding the sense of community I’d lost during the pandemic. I attended gorgeous weddings in Seattle, Brooklyn, and right here in Chicago, and actively worked on expanding and strengthening my support network of friends and family. And while I still have plenty of questions and anxieties about what the future of my career looks like (that’s freelancing for you!), I also feel a renewed sense of confidence in my identity as a critic and a renewed love of movies and television too. (Thank goodness!)
I even got it together to pick my 10 favorite films of 2023, which I’ll share below along with a round-up of all the major writing and podcasts I did throughout the year. If you enjoy my work, you can support me on Substack, Kofi, PayPal, or Venmo, or follow me on Instagram and Letterboxd. And you can expect much more to come from Girl Culture in 2024!
MY FAVORITE FILMS OF 2023
Asteroid City
Origin
All of Us Strangers
May December
Past Lives
Maestro
The Zone of Interest
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Barbie
Rye Lane
MY 2023 WRITING/PODCAST ROUND-UP
Girl Culture
Podcasts
The Daily Beast
Episodic Medium reviews
Block Club Chicago
Blue Man Group’s Sensory-Friendly Performance Returns Sunday After 4 Years
Green Living Comes To Life At Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s New Sustainability Center
Black Ensemble Theater’s ‘The Other Cinderella’ Celebrates 47 Years Of The Updated Fairy Tale
And here are similar year-end wrap-ups I did for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.
I fell in love with your writing when you were doing Romance Met Comedy and am so grateful that you've found a place to continue at your own pace and on the subjects you're most interested in covering! You're my favorite entertainment writer by a mile. I'm glad you took the time you needed in 2023 and I can't wait to see what this year has in store!
I used to love when you would highlight movies that were underrated, underloved, or had sometimes just faded from the cultural memory at large (for example Mississippi Masala, which I hadn't heard of before your writeup), so I hope you continue to occasionally dip into that kind of well here on this column. But I'll happily follow along wherever you go. Thanks for doing what you do!
Love this, Caroline! So great to catch up on your 2023 progress and travails. I’m looking forward to learning what 2024 brings your way. Somehow I’m sure it’s going to be a doozy for us all.