The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition. (Looking at you, Academy.) Awards are given for Best Believable, Best Narrative, and Best Interfaces (overall). Some years I give awards and shout-outs to other interesting trends or interfaces I spot along the way. This year I’ll do that, too.

History (still) unfolding note: Here in my home country we are still in the throes of Epstein-class fascism that amounts to a crimes-against-humanity, cartoonishly-incompetent, distraction-war. We are obligated to root out and overcome these forces. But we can’t be “on” 24/7, and sometimes the best thing we can do in these circumstances is resist and thrive, so despite the daily horrors, for when you’re done protesting and voting and resisting, I present this minor distraction with the full knowledge that there are other things with orders of magnitude more importance going on. It is not meant to normalize the kakistocracy.

Last year surprised me for the number of quality interfaces in sci-fi. I keep a long note on my phone across the year as I see shows, and despite that very concrete memory anchor, when I started thinking through the complete set for 2025, I had a vague sense that there weren’t that many. But when I started looking, I was wrong. There are a lot, and some really good ones. I’ll save further comments on the whole year in the wrap-up post.

Major spoilers in the days and weeks ahead, as I’ll be posting these in parts. Today, a pre-award shout-out to interfaces from long-format shows.

Pre-award shout out: Series!

Long-form formats like TV shows require a lot more of me to give those interfaces their due. More watching, more capturing, more analysis. But I do watch some shows, and there’s some great, great stuff happening. Maybe I should start an Emmy-esque award series, but that takes time I do not have. But as a simple shout-out, let me name a few you might want to check out.

Check out Alien Earth!

Working between the palette of the existing movies and genre and bringing something new to the franchise.

Check out Murderbot!

Check out their beautifully controlled palette (light gray and orange as keystone colors are just gorgeous), and what look like deeply considered interfaces throughout.

Check out Pluribus!

It’s much more of an abstract conversation, but the show is quite smart about the interfaces between the Unum (my term for the hive mind) and the free-willed. (Though come on, surely they could shorten that voice mail message after her first couple of calls.)

There are certainly some shows I’ve missed because I don’t have so much time to survey all the TV shows, much less in their entirety. Sorry if I missed your favorites, but give a comment below if there’s a series with great interfaces. As noted, though, the Fritzes are about movies, so I’ll say so long to TV for now.

Previous awards: [2021] [2022] [2023] [2024] [2025]

Next up: We’ll move on to movies and the Best Believable interfaces from 2025