The Pop Culture Junkie podcast is re-running a special series of episodes looking back at the past decade, chronicling the highs and lows, at least from a pop culture standpoint. Each episode deals with two years, so we had to leave some stuff out. A year is a long time! So as a companion piece, here is a more in-depth look at each year in pop culture.

2017 HAD US ASKING…

• Was Get Out terrifying or are you a fragile white person?
• Is it a boy, a girl, or a tragic wildfire that destroyed 47,000 acres?
• Did The Handmaid’s Tale hit a little too close to home?
• Cash me ousside…how ‘bow dah?

THE FILMS

This year, original, high-concept films cleaned up at awards time, and superhero movies and sequels to established franchises made bank at the box office. On the one hand, we were all talking about Jordan Peele’s Academy Award-winning (for the screenplay) directorial debut Get Out, a psychological horror about racists who pretended they weren’t racist. We also lined up for Dunkirk, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, You Were Never Really Here, Ingrid Goes West, Hidden Figures, The Upside, Dear White People, I, Tonya, mother! and the animated Coco. But then audiences also were flocking to see Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Wonder Woman, Justice League (not the Snyder cut), Thor: Ragnarok, John Wick Chapter 2, Logan, The Fate of the Furious, Cars 3, Despicable Me 3, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the live-action Beauty and the Beast, not to mention sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean, Jumanji, and Planet of the Apes. Oh, and there was the Lego Batman Movie. Stephen King’s creepy killer clown classic It got a reboot, M. Night Shymalan gave us Unbreakable‘s sneaky secret sequel Split, and despite there being numerous other animated features offered this year, The Boss Baby scored a spot in the top 20.

THE TUNES

2017 was the year of…Ed Sheeran? The ginger song stylist had Billboard’s number one hit with the danceable, upbeat “The Shape of You,” which according to Spin Magazine, was “a plausible attempt at convincing us he has had sex.” What a burn. That year also brought us the funkier “Despacito,” from Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber, “That’s What I Like” by Bruno Mars, “Humble” by Kendrick Lamar, “Bad and Boujee” by Migos and Lil Uzi Vert, “Bodak Yellow” by Cardi B, “Boys” by Charli XCX, and “Congratulations” by Post Malone. Chainsmokers contined to chart, this time with “Something Just Like This,” a song featuring Coldplay. Imagine Dragons rocked us with “Believer,” Sam Hunt sang a lusty anthem to someone with a “Body Like a Back Road,” and Harry Styles went solo with “Sign of the Times,” while fellow One Direction-er Zayn collaborated with Taylor Swift on “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever,” from Fifty Shades Darker. DJ Khaled charted twice, with “Wild Thoughts” and “I’m the One” and Frank Ocean scored with “Chanel.”

THE TELEVISION

This year, Hulu introduced an original series based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, and it felt a little too on the nose, forshadowing the time (2022) when women would be reduced to breeding stock with limited freedom. The CW turned the bubble-gum comic book characters Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead and cast them in a dark, brooding mystery series that would eventually become one of the WTF-est shows on television, with human sacrifices, parallel universes, serial killers, cults, and an epic fight between Archie and a bear. There were also shows you could actually admit that you watch: Ozark, American Gods, The Santa Clarita Diet, and GLOW all boasted good writing and top-notch acting from stars like Jason Bateman, Michael Sheen, Drew Barrymore and Alison Brie. 2017 tapped into a major cultural yearning for the past: the year was a huge year for reboots and remakes. We were streaming new versions of Will and Grace, Twin Peaks, Prison Break, One Day at a Time, Dynasty, The Tick, Samurai Jack, and Ducktales, along with a resurgence of old game shows like Love Connection, Fear Factor, Cash Cab and The Gong Show. Wet Hot American Summer turned the concept on its ear by creating a prequel series where the cast played younger versions of the characters they portrayed in the 2001 film.  Star Trek came back with Discovery, and Fox brought us The Orville, a comedic homage to the Star Trek concept. Superhero shows were big too, like The Inhumans, Iron Fist, The Defenders, Legion, Punisher, and The Runaways.

THE TRENDS, TOYS AND TECH

Believe it or not, we didn’t have TikTok until 2017. Where did we lip synch, dance, and start mindless destructive trends before that? TikTok began life as the Musical.ly app, which was a Chinese social media service that went worldwide in 2018. It’s hugely popular and was downloaded over 104 million times from the Apple store by mid-2018. This year we also took gaming mobile with the Nintendo Switch and kept our hands busy with fidget spinners, a surprisingly simple, non-electronic toy that sat upon our fingertips and spun. Spotify playlists became the new mixtapes that curated our musical tastes and allowed us to share them with everyone we knew. This year Door Dash surpassed Uber Eats as the company most likely to bring chicken wings to our front doors, and Porgs replaced Ewoks as the most cuddly creatures in the Star Wars universe.

Destruction was a big trend in 2017, which brought us the schadenfreude-rich Fyre Festival, a luxury concert event that was postponed and eventually cancelled due to problems with security, food, accommodation and medical services. Guests got FEMA tents and cheese sandwiches instead of gourmet meals and luxury villas. It made for an excellent documentary several years later though, with the infamous “BJ Guy” becoming an instant fan favorite. The integrity of the Academy Awards was nearly blitzed when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway read the wrong envelope and announced the best picture winner was La La Land instead of Moonlight. Boy, was that embarassing. Among the not rich and famous, the simple act of finding out the gender of your unborn child was turned into a chance to watch the world burn instead. In April of 2017, a couple held a gender reveal party in Arizona, where someone shot at two makeshift targets in the desert, one saying ‘boy’ and one saying ‘girl’. After the target was hit, a wildfire started immediately, burning up 47,000 acres and doing $8 million in damage. Whoops. Other gender reveal tragedies included one in Southern California that sparked a fire that forced the evacuation of half of a town, one that caused a plane crash in Texas, and an explosive device that went off in Iowa, killing a woman who was one of the baby’s grandmothers. Really not cool, folks. Sadder still were violent episodes at concert events, including a mass shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas and a bombing at an Ariana Grande show in London that took the lives of 27 people. But in better news, the burgeoning #MeToo movement allowed us to see just how pervasive sexual assault was in the lives of women (and men), and when enough women realized they weren’t alone, a lot of sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein finally faced consequences after decades of getting away with criminal behavior. The destruction of his career was a win for everyone. This year, we also started using #BlackLivesMatter, because they do, and that should be recognized.

THE MEMES AND CATCHPHRASES

13-year-old Danielle Bregoli appeared on the Dr Phil show in 2017, and challenged an audience member to a fight, saying “Cash me ousside, how bow dah?” and a catchphrase was born. We used it ironically, but we loved it anyway. Bregoli would go on to have a rap “career” under the name “Bhad Babie” with a trap remix of her famous phrase. What a time to be alive. This year, we “couldn’t even,” we were so “shook,” and “triggered.”  But when things were good, they were “Gucci,” and we couldn’t help being a bit “extra” because of that. And before you could say “Bye Felicia,” the year was over.

This was a year of classic memes that are still seen everywhere today, like the “distracted boyfriend” meme, a stock photo a guy, holding hands with one girl, turning around to ogle another one (who looks almost identical to the one he’s got.) Now it stands for any person who’s intrigued by a shiny new object rather than the stuff they’ve already got. The image’s photographer, Antonio Guillem from Barcelona, wasn’t pleased people were using his image without paying royalties, but that’s the internet for you. Also this year, we saw the rise of the “galaxy brain” meme, the tongue-in-cheek “this is the future liberals want” memes (that usually depicted something awesome), and the “blinking guy” meme, a series of stills of gamer Drew Scanlon taken during an episode of GiantBomb series “Unprofessional Fridays” where he does a double take at something idiotic one of his colleagues says. Way to speak for us all, Drew.

SAYING GOODBYE

The Windows phone (yes, they had one) went offline this year, and we as a culture decided we had finally had enough of dabbing. Among the voices silenced forever this year were those of singers Al Jarreau, Tommy Page, Chris Cornell (Soundgarden, Audioslave), Greg Allman, Chester Bennington (Linkin Park), Glen Campbell, Troy Gentry, Tom Petty, Prodigy, Gord Downie (The Tragically Hip), Della Reese, Mel Tillis, Pat Dinizio (The Smithereens) and David Cassidy. We also lost rock legend Chuck Berry and The Gong Show host Chuck Barris mere days apart, which doesn’t help me not confuse them with each other. Other notable deaths include Miguel Ferrer, Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara Hale and John Hurt, Richard Hatch and Bill Paxton, TV Judge Joseph Wapner, Don Rickles, J. Geils, Chappelle Show star Charlie Murphy, Erin Moran of Happy Days, Jonathan Demme, Powers Boothe, Roger Moore aka James Bond, Adam West, TV’s Batman, Martin Landau and George Romero, John Heard, June Foray, Sam Shepherd, Jerry Lewis and Harry Dean Stanton, Jake LaMotta, Hugh Hefner, Monty Hall and Malcolm Young, as well as classic sitcom stars Jim Nabors and Rose Marie.

And that’s a bigger, better look at the year in pop culture, circa 2017.