The Brief

Of everything I saw on TV in 2025, the one show I thought was the very best, and has haunted me ever since, was the four-part Netflix drama Adolescence. It's the story of a young teen accused of murdering a classmate, and it's told in such a way, emotionally and technically, that I can't and won't forget it. It's the show I recommend most highly, but with a major caveat. It's grim. And it's almost unbearably intense.

Intensity, it turns out, is a common factor among many of my very favorite shows from this year. HBO Max's The Pitt was a medical show with an impressively credible tension factor. So was Netflix's The Diplomat, with its unpredictable, high-stakes plot twists. And so was FX's The Bear, even though it wasn't about life or death, just appetizers and entrees. The Bear even calls itself a comedy, but it's not. Much, much too dramatic for that.

A couple of my other favorite TV dramas, almost equally intense, featured ragtag, mismatched investigative teams thrown together to solve specific crimes. One, HBO's Task, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with lots of emotional baggage, played by Mark Ruffalo. Another, Netflix's Dept. Q, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with even more emotional baggage, played by Matthew Goode.

And maybe it's just me, but this year I definitely gravitated to dramatic shows that made me uneasy. It was another great season for Netflix's Black Mirror, and the end-of-year final episode of another dark Netflix fantasy series, Stranger Things, is eagerly awaited by many. Including me, because I've seen all the new episodes leading up to it, but the finale is being kept under wraps.

Stranger Things has been around since 2016 — almost a decade — but other terrific genre productions were new takes on old ideas. Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, on Netflix, was an excellent and very different adaptation. And what Noah Hawley did by reinventing the Alien movie franchise, for the FX TV series Alien: Earth, was thrilling — and, at times, truly scary. And still churning out weekly episodes, brilliant ones, is Pluribus, the new, indescribably original Apple TV sci-fi series from Vince Gilligan.

The comedies I liked best this year? Some were set behind-the-scenes of show biz — like the new Apple TV series The Studio, starring Seth Rogen as a bumbling but well-meaning studio head, and the returning HBO Max series Hacks, starring Jean Smart as a female comic landing a job as a TV talk-show host. The other comedies were lighthearted mysteries benefiting greatly from their veteran cast members: Hulu's Only Murders in the Building and Netflix's A Man on the Inside. Both of those shows made me feel good — which is a lot to ask of any TV show these days.

Nonfiction TV also offered many excellent options this year. Artistic profiles to seek out from 2025 include Apple TV's Mr. Scorsese, about film director Martin Scorsese, and HBO's Pee-wee as Himself, about actor Paul Reubens. Most recently, there's the short but powerful Netflix documentary All the Empty Rooms, about a TV feature reporter and photographer who visit the families of children killed during school shootings, to memorialize the children's empty, but still intact, bedrooms. It's as tough to watch as Adolescence — and, oddly, touches on a similar subject.

Other great documentaries this year included Sunday Best, a new Netflix program about Ed Sullivan's contributions to popularizing Black entertainers; PBS's The American Revolution, the latest and perhaps greatest epic history lesson from Ken Burns and company; and the new installment of The Beatles Anthology, presented by Disney+.

On talk shows, I loved the feisty, topical spirit invoked by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers and John Oliver — and especially the well-aimed irreverence of the current season of Comedy Central's South Park. Wow. Many of these shows were attacked or censored by their corporate owners, in well-publicized clashes that exposed, and fought against, the interference. The CBS Late Show franchise is being retired from the schedule — but most of the time this year, the comics and their programs persevered.

Finally, my favorite TV moment of 2025 came courtesy of CNN. Not for a news bulletin, but for televising, live from Broadway, a production of Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney as veteran CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. At the end of the play, Clooney recites Murrow's actual speech to news and TV executives from 1958, urging them to use TV wisely.

In the year 2025, the best of television — from The American Revolution to Adolescence — is living up to Ed Murrow's inspirational ideals. We all just have to find the best that's out there … then find the time to watch it.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Huntington Beach City Councilmember Butch Twining has sued Ocean View School District President Gina Clayton-Tarvin for what he alleges is a “sustained and coordinated campaign to publicly brand” him as “a white supremacist and extremist.”

At the heart of the complaint are Clayton-Tarvin’s tweets about Twining attending a vigil to honor slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. On Sept. 13, 2025, she tweeted, “What’s worse? That Huntington Beach councilman Butch Twining was there gleefully chanting amongst alt right white supremacists. Anyone recognize this behavior? Look no further than his buddy and mentor councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark, HB’s resident Neo Nazi since 2017.”

In the lawsuit, lawyers for Twining wrote Clayton-Tarvin “weaponized” the vigil “into a digital smear campaign” against Twining that was carried out across multiple social media platforms and community forums.

According to the lawsuit, the vigil was “hijacked by a small group of bad faith opportunists,” prompting Twining to leave the vigil.

“Twining did not participate in the chant or march alongside the racist opportunists. Twining condemns white supremacy in all of its forms,” the attorneys wrote.

The lawsuit accuses Clayton-Tarvin of being “a prolific poster of misinformation designed to cause reputational harm” and that her recent posts are “increasingly manic and reckless, as if

the author is not only lying but also losing touch with reality.”

Twining also alleges that Clayton-Tarvin’s tweets led to three death threats.

A video that went viral from the day of the vigil that Clayton-Tarvin quoted in her tweet shows Twining holding a candle and an American flag. Some people are chanting “white men fight back” in the video, but it is unclear if Twining was one of them.

In an interview with LAist, Clayton-Tarvin called the legal action a “nonsense lawsuit.”

“ Butch Twining is a very sensitive man and he doesn't understand that he's trying to chill free speech. The facts of the matter are that he was there and he can't deny it,” she said, adding that her tweets were posted three days after the vigil and Twining was seen by hundreds of people.

Twining, she said, is going down a “slippery slope” with the lawsuit, showing other residents in the city that if they speak up or criticize a politician, they can be sued. Twining is seeking $25 million in damages from Clayton-Tarvin.

“This is about squashing the First Amendment, about damaging the public's rights, public participation,” she said.

Cookbooks have always meant more to me than a list of recipes — they're storytelling objects. They carry memory, culture, voice, and visuals and they help us create memorable moments with the people we love.

That's the spirit behind Cookbook LIVE, an LAist live event series co-produced with the James Beard Foundation, that I've had the joy of hosting. Over three evenings, we brought together top cookbook authors and food-lover audiences for nights of culinary connection and exploration.

To close out the series, I sat down with James Beard Award winner and L.A. icon Roy Choi in November. His newest book, The Choi of Cooking — his first in over a decade — reimagines some of his go-to dishes with a lighter, more veg-forward twist. It's a book that reflects where he is now: still rooted in the flavors that made him a chef, but thinking about how we eat for the long haul.

During our conversation, Roy walked us through some of his favorite recipes and opened up about the journey that shaped him: growing up in kitchens filled with his mother’s "future food”, finding cooking later in life, surviving New York's toughest restaurants, and building Kogi into something cosmic and communal. It was an evening full of honesty, laughter, and real talk about food justice, access, and the myths we still cling to about chefs.

Below, I've pulled together a handful moments in the conversation have stuck with me — moments that resonated long after we left the stage.

Roy Choi in his own words

On his journey into cooking

Chef Roy Choi and LAist's Gab Chabrán discuss "The Choi of Cooking" before a sold-out crowd at Cookbook LIVE

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"The beginning of my chef career — entering the hardest kitchens before I even knew how to cook.

I found cooking a little bit later in life, in my mid-20s. A lot of cooks get into the kitchen very young. I grew up in a restaurant, but I wasn't really focused on being a cook. I was just in the restaurant as a restaurant kid.

I didn't really get into it until my late 20s, and so I felt like I had to make up time before I even knew how to cook, I was going to jump into the hardest top kitchens in the world and just figure it out on the fly.

Those kitchens were in New York City .... in 1997, I worked in the number one, number two and number three kitchen in New York City. Four stars on all restaurants. And I was not ready for that at all.

By the time I was done with those kitchens, I was just at a point where I should have been when I entered. But it built my palate, it built my work ethic, my technical skills and my sensory aptitude of everything."

On growing up in his parent's kitchen and "future cooking"

"My mom cooks for like 300 people and there are three of us in the room. She doesn't know how to alter the recipe . . . the recipe's built for 50 pounds of chicken. So she's still doing it to this day.

I grew up always in a house that smelled like cooking all the time. There was always food on the stove or on the table or in the laundry room. But that food wasn't for eating, it was for the future.

My mom was a futurist. Everything she was cooking was for the future, and what I was eating in the moment was from the past.

It never stopped. It was relentless — almost like maintaining a sourdough starter or working a 24-hour shift . . . soy sauce steeping, kimchi fermenting, garlic being roasted. On another level when you're 16, 17 and you bring friends over — you gotta explain it.

With a beef bone broth soup . . . it takes three days to cook that soup. You have to decide on Thursday that you're going to eat it on Sunday. You have to think of the soup today."

On starting Kogi and what it unlocked

Roy Choi, left, hands out food from his Kogi BBQ truck in Maywood in January 2024.

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"We started from a drunk night. It was a drunk night eating tacos in Koreatown, and my partner said, 'What if we put Korean barbecue in this? It'd be delicious.' And that's how it started."

When we started Kogi, when we were out on the streets, it was all of the ladies of the lot. That's why my name is Papi Chulo. All the tías embraced me . . . Kogi wouldn't exist if we didn't get the pass from the tías.

To me, Kogi is very cosmic. It never gets old. We've been around 17 years now . . . In 17 years, it's never felt like it needed to change. There are not many foods that live within this lexicon of timelessness . . . I've been very fortunate to crack the code on one of them."

On food justice and the reality of price

The chef's new book "The Choi of Cooking"

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"We still have to figure out why so much food goes to waste and why so many people are hungry . . . we have to move the priority of that dilemma upwards... build, like, a TikTok eating culture around the disparity in food justice.

I would like food to be a lot more affordable. The chef world is getting out of control. $42 for a pasta is ridiculous; a pasta without lobster shouldn't be $42 just 'cause it was handmade.

Price is the number one coded message within the disparity within food. It's the hidden thing. It's the secret message, the secret handshake and the dirty secret that no one wants to talk about. If you charge $42 for that pasta, it's going to just automatically exclude a whole sector of society and close the door on anyone being able to affect change in the future because they'll never be exposed to it."

On the fallacy of the restaurant chef

"A myth about being a chef or a restaurateur . . . that we got our shit together is a big fallacy.

You guys write about [chefs] like they're gods . . . like they're elves . . . the word 'genius' is thrown around a lot around chefs. That's so untrue, man. Chefs are hardworking people. A lot of chefs that you think have everything put together are literally figuring it out as you see them.

I don't believe that we're perfect, that we're geniuses and that we're gods and otherworldly. It's a job and a profession that requires you to get down on your knees, on your elbows, fingers in the dirt and really cook. You're more a sailor than you are a god or an elf."