The 2010s just ended and now is a good time to reflect on my favorite entertainment from that decade spanning video games, television and film.

There were many TV shows that actually premiered before the 2010s, but some of my favorite episodes of those shows actually aired in the last decade, including Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Family Guy, American Dad! and Archer, but for the sake of simplicity, I will not include those.

Here are all my personal favorite things from the 2010s.

Tangled

Disney’s 50th animated film was a welcome throwback to the classic fairy tale musicals that Disney seemed to stop making in the 2000s, and it set the stage for other princess movies like Frozen, Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon as well as signified a return to glory for Walt Disney Animation that continues to this day.

The Walking Dead

This is the TV show of the 2010s that I was the most hooked on. A zombie thriller that focuses on character drama, thereby making the horror caused by the zombies (and the humans) all the more terrifying.

Red Dead Redemption

The Western is a genre that has been long forgotten by Hollywood but it came back in a big way in this open-world video game from Rockstar Games (the infamous creators behind Grand Theft Auto) and I have never had more fun getting immersed in the old West.

Heavy Rain

This PlayStation 3 game offered multiple choices that affected the story in different ways which made for a fun interactive experience, but the well-written story was also absorbing whether it was interactive or not.

The Artist

One of my favorite movies of the decade was this silent film that felt like an homage to classic Hollywood but more importantly told an entertaining story regardless of which decade you watched it in.

Game of Thrones

Who would win the Iron Throne? That is a question that I have been asking for ten years and I have enjoyed visiting and revisiting the fantasy realm of Westeros over eight seasons to find out the answer. Of course I would never wanna actually live there. It’s way more fun witnessing the dragons and family dysfunction from afar.

Key & Peele

The Mad TV alums Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele have great comedic chemistry and a sharp sense of humor but they also tackled subjects in Key & Peele that I’ve never seen previous sketch shows tackle before, which makes them creative as well as funny.

Veep

A dark political satire that was not only an accurate portrayal of Washington but a hilarious comedy with an outstanding lead performance from Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a narcissistic Vice President. And the more unlikable and insulting the characters were, the funnier the show was.

Journey

If anyone needed proof that video games are art, it was this beautiful game that was going to do it. No dialogue is spoken, but the game is emotional nonetheless.

Orange Is the New Black

The thing I loved about this Netflix prison drama was that there were dozens of characters in the cast, and every single one of them from the prisoners to the guards to the prison warden was interesting. Especially when the show dove into their back stories via flashback.

Rick and Morty

The Adult Swim sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty was so outrageous and unafraid to do or say anything that the writing was free to be as funny and as intelligent as possible, often making for a show that was more than just a dumb comedy. Although it never forgot that it was a dumb comedy.

The Last of Us

I don’t normally like gritty first-person shooter games, but just like with the Metal Gear series, the zombie game The Last of Us pulled me in with characters that I cared about and a story that was emotionally absorbing as well as fittingly eerie.

The Lego Movie

The Lego Movie seemed like little more than a toy commercial when I first saw the trailers but Phil Lord and Christopher Miller made it much more, and they ended up telling a story that was more of an imaginative and heartfelt fable than a cynical cash grab.

Jane the Virgin

Television at its most addictive. Nothing drove me more crazy than the love triangle at the center of this CW telenovela. The soapy drama was high-stakes and it featured everything from murder to amnesia and even evil twins, but the acting was so good that the characters were all grounded in reality, which is what really kept me invested.

Broad City

No comedy duo made me laugh more than Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in the New York-set Comedy Central series Broad City, which was the first show I’ve ever watched that featured city girl millennials speaking the way I hear actual city girl millennials speak in real life.

BoJack Horseman

Starts out as a commentary on being a washed up Hollywood celebrity and soon turns into something much darker and more depressing.

Inside Out

One of the best films of the decade was this movie that took place inside the mind of a little girl. It was one of the most creative works of art in Pixar’s filmography and it also tackled themes of growing up and the importance of expressing emotions in smart ways.

Better Call Saul

This spin-off of Breaking Bad that told the origin story of sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman is just as absorbing as Breaking Bad and in some ways more intriguing since you know where the story is going. You just don’t know how it’s going to get there. And that’s part of the fun.

Undertale

This RPG that took place in a strange underworld full of monsters was more like a parody of an RPG but it was very funny and fun to play. It was like a cross between Earthbound and Grim Fandango but even more weird than both of those games.

Deadpool

I had been waiting for Marvel superhero Deadpool to hit the big screen for years and when Ryan Reynolds finally headed a movie starring the Merc with a Mouth, it was everything I hoped it would be, R-rated humor intact.

La La Land

I fell in love with this musical from the first scene, and it only got better from there. Words can’t describe how much I loved it. Just watch it.

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

I binged right through this miniseries and was never bored for a single minute. Even if it wasn’t based on one of the most famous cases in modern history, it would still be a brilliant and intriguing drama.

Get Out

Jordan Peele’s horror film about a Black man spending the weekend with his White girlfriend and her family who are not as innocent as they seem combined racism and horror in such a memorable and frightening way that the film instantly became a classic and Peele started instantly being called a young Spielberg.

Wonder Woman

It was about time Wonder Woman finally got her own movie, and it largely succeeded On the likability of Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins’ focus on the character’s heart and humanity.

Planet of the Apes Trilogy

The journey of Caesar (performed in motion capture by Andy Serkis) from human pet to lab experiment to enemy of humans to eventual ruler of Earth keeps getting more and more captivating with each movie release in this trilogy and the conflict between the apes and the humans is more nuanced and less easy to pick sides for than you might expect.

Cuphead

The rubberhose animation-inspired art style of the action-packed side-scrolling game Cuphead was only half the game’s appeal. The other half was how relentlessly challenging it was. It tested the mettle of players like few other games have.

Super Mario Odyssey

There were a lot of great Mario games from this decade but none as fun as this one which allowed you to use Mario’s hat to possess everything from Goombas and Chain Chomps to ghosts and dinosaurs.

What Remains of Edith Finch

Exploring the long-abandoned mansion of your ancestors to learn about a family curse was a video game premise that was both riveting and unforgettable.

Black Panther

Nothing made me weep the way I did watching a superhero movie that not only featured Black characters in the lead but told a story that only could have been told through the Black POV in a way that only director Ryan Coogler could have done, making the cast’s race essential to the film’s themes. For the first time I heard my voice in a Marvel film.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

One of the best films of the decade was this fresh and fun animated sci-fi tale about a group of different versions of Spider-Man teaming up to bring order to the multiverse. The look and feel is different from most American animated films but the humor and heart of the story are what really make it a home run.

God of War

A father-son drama that doubled as interactive entertainment, this PS4 game added a level of depth to Kratos that was not seen in the largely action-focused God of War trilogy that previously spanned PS2 and PS3.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

A Super Smash Bros. game that features every playable character from every previous Super Smash Bros. game. Enough said.

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Marvel made creating a decade of interconnected movies and bringing them together in an intergalactic crossover look easy, but the fact that they pulled it off and still managed to make the majority of their films completely entertaining in their own right is a cinematic achievement like no other.

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

When Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released, I fell in love with the series all over again. Characters like Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron were easy to root for and Kylo Ren was a villain who was easy to hate. By the time The Rise of Skywalker came out in 2019, the sequel trilogy had taken its place as my second-favorite trilogy set in a galaxy far, far away of all time.

Toy Story 4

I would have put Toy Story 3 on this list but its significance got overshadowed by the fourth entry. TS3 was seemingly the perfect ending for the series, but it was not the perfect ending for Woody, who feels lost without Andy at the beginning of Toy Story 4, a movie that features a much more satisfying ending to Woody’s story.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

I love the Muppets but I was never the biggest fan of Jim Henson’s 1982 fantasy The Dark Crystal. That is, until I watched this highly entertaining and surprisingly well-written Netflix prequel series. The fact that they brought back old-school puppetry to make it also made it feel unlike any other modern television show.

The Mandalorian

The Mandalorian was not the first TV series based on Star Wars that I liked, but it soon became the best.

Kingdom Hearts III

This decade featured excellent games like Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep for the PlayStation Portable and Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance for the Nintendo 3DS, but nothing could compare to seeing the entire saga conclude in the long-awaited sequel to Kingdom Hearts II after waiting ages to see Sora finally defeat Xehanort.

Untitled Goose Game

A game where you played as a goose whose goal was basically to ruin everyone’s day was as silly as it was entertaining.

Death Stranding

Hideo Kojima’s mindbending game about a delivery man and a baby who team up to reconnect society in post-apocalyptic America blew my mind with its ambitious scope, creativity, beautiful graphics and incredible acting. It was a hard sell for a lot of gamers because it’s a long game, it has a lot of cutscenes, it has a complex story, and most of the gameplay involves long trips across huge landscapes while handling deliveries with care, which isn’t the most enticing. But the thing is, if you are someone who has a lot of patience and free time, and you like cerebral sci-fi stories, this is pretty much a perfect game.