Your guide to December's best pop culture

Welcome to See/Hear, InsideHook’s deep dive into the month’s most important cultural happenings, pop and otherwise. Every month, we round up the biggest upcoming movie, TV and album releases, ask some cool people to tell us what they've been into lately, make you a playlist we guarantee you'll have on heavy rotation and recommend a classic (or unduly overlooked) piece of pop culture that we think is worth revisiting.

Beyond all the traditional holiday fare, December traditionally gifts us with some of the year's biggest movie releases, and this year is no different with the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, the buzzy Nightbitch and not one, but two new films about the end of the world. Beyond that, this month will treat us to a new Squid Game season, a big live album from The National and plenty more — so let's get to it. — Bonnie Stiernberg, Managing Editor

p.s. — As always, feel free to hit me up here with comments, suggestions or recommendations of your own.

A Complete Unknown

in theaters Dec. 25

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan is the main draw here (especially because he does his own singing and playing and reportedly performs a whopping 40 songs in the movie), but A Complete Unknown also has a stacked supporting cast that includes Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (a fictionalized version of Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo) and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, it’s centered around the controversy over Dylan going electric, and per a request from the man himself, it contains one scene that’s wholly inaccurate. Will you be able to spot it?

Plus: Tilda Swinton pulls double duty with The End and The Room Next Door, Amy Adams transforms into a dog in Nightbitch, Nicole Kidman gets spicy in Babygirl and more. Check out our complete list of upcoming December movies here.

Squid Game season two

Dec. 26 on Netflix

It’s been more than three years since Squid Game became a global phenomenon, and the Korean series is finally back for an encore. You’d think that after surviving season one’s deadly game, Player 456 would want to stay as far away from it as possible, but season two sees our hero (played by Lee Jung-jae) returning to the sadistic game in an attempt to put an end to it for good, coaching his fellow players and saving lives in the process. Will he be successful? Based on the fact that the show has already been renewed for a third and final season, we have to assume no.

Plus: A new British spy thriller, a wacky Canadian maple syrup heist and more. Check out our complete list of December TV release dates here.

The National, Rome

Dec. 13

If you’ve never had a chance to see The National perform live before, you can now get the next-best thing with Rome, the band’s new 21-track, 2-LP live album. (You should still really go to a National show, though.) Recorded without overdubs on June 3, 2024 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone in Rome, the career-spanning set includes favorites like “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” “I Need My Girl,” “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” “England” and “Fake Empire” as well as rarities like “Lemonworld” and “The Geese of Beverly Road.”

Plus: Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre are reunited on Missionary, Lucinda Williams covers the Beatles, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren Mayberry goes solo and more. Check out our complete list of December album releases here.

🎧 December is dark and depressing, so we hang festive lights and decorations and get all dressed up in sparkly metallics or rich jewel tones to brighten things up a bit. We convince ourselves that the snow we nearly throw our backs out shoveling is cozy and beautiful. We make toasts and eat big, hearty meals and go out of our way to show our loved ones just how much they mean to us with perfect, thoughtful tokens of our affection. We save all that warmth for the part of the year when we most desperately need our days to be merry and bright; we polish the lump of coal life handed us until it shines like a diamond. But there’s also an inherent sadness to the holiday that comes from the expectations we’ve attached to it.

For every person traveling home to be with their family, there’s another spending the day alone. For all the beautifully wrapped gifts sitting under the tree waiting to be opened, there’s a less fortunate person wondering how they’re going to explain to their kids that Santa won’t be coming or just looking for a way to get out of the cold. It can be a day of tight, forced smiles at awkward family gatherings. And for some reason, it all hits harder than on any of the other 364 days of the year.

There’s nothing sadder than being sad on Christmas, the day we’ve collectively willed to be the most joyful of all. Perhaps that’s why there’s an entire sub-genre of Christmas songs devoted to this phenomenon. Some, like the Darlene Love classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” hide their melancholy lyrics behind a deceptively upbeat wall of sound, while others go straight for the jugular, but they all scratch a certain emotional itch this time of year, no matter what your circumstances are. With that in mind, we’ve put together a playlist of some of the saddest Yuletide jams we know.

Mad Men, “Christmas Waltz” (2012)

Streaming on Prime Video, AMC+ and Philo

You no doubt are ready to cozy up and put on It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story or whatever your holiday movie of choice is at some point this month, and you should absolutely do that. But if you’re looking for something that’s more Christmas-adjacent than full-on festive, you can’t go wrong with this classic episode from season five of Mad Men.

“Christmas Waltz” has a lot of other compelling storylines — the brief return of Paul, who has become a Hare Krishna to impress a girl, the news that Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is back in the running for the Jaguar account and Lane’s growing financial woes — but ultimately it’s notable for one classic scene: Don and Joan flirting at the bar while Doris Day croons the holiday tune the episode takes its name from.

It all starts when Joan gets served divorce papers at the office and flips out at Meredith, the hapless receptionist. (When she explains that she thought the man serving Joan was there for some sort of surprise, Joan responds by chucking the model airplane on her desk and delivering one of the series’ most memorable lines: “Surprise! There’s an airplane here to see you!“) It’s the first time in the whole series that we really see the typically unflappable Joan lose her composure at work, and it’s so jarring that Don is forced to swoop in and physically escort her out of the office to calm her down. He takes her to a Jaguar showroom, where they pose as a married couple looking to test-drive one of the luxury vehicles. Of course, it’s also an opportunity for the two hottest people in the office to test-drive what it’d be like if they were to give in to temptation and hook up, and naturally, they wind up at a bar.