The Most Jaw-Dropping Pop Culture Moments of 2024 Revealed

Jan. 1: Following Kansas City's New Year's Eve home game, Taylor Swift met Travis Kelce at midnight. And when she and her guy on the Chiefs shared a welcome-to-2024 kiss, they certainly made the whole place shimmer.

Jan. 1: Raise a glass to CNN for lifting their previous NYE alcohol ban as it gifted viewers with a very giggly Anderson Cooper, who couldn't help himself after cohost Andy Cohen and pal Neil Patrick Harris made some racy jokes about hooking up with fans. 

Jan. 7: When gossip ran rampant about what Selena Gomez was whispering to bestie Taylor Swift at the Golden Globes, the Rare Beauty founder filled in the blank space. No, she wasn't recounting a run-in with Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet. "I told Taylor about two of my friends who hooked up," Gomez commented on E! News' Instagram post about the situation. "Not that that's anyone business."

Jan. 14: Chelsea Handler got the last laugh after her ex Jo Koy bombed as host of the Golden Globes. When she helmed the stage at the Critics Choice Awards a week later, she took a swipe at his claim that his monologue jokes fell flat because "some I wrote, some other people wrote." 

Following her quip that she preferred her men "old and hot" and would like to toss Martin Scorsese around "like a little Italian meatball," Handler said, "Thank you for laughing at that, my writers wrote it."

Jan 21: Singing in a tribute show for Dolly Parton's 78th birthday at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, Elle King forgot the words to the icon's "Marry Me" then told the crowd, "Y'all bought tickets for this s--t? You ain't getting your money back."

She then added, "I'll tell you one thing more. Hi, my name is Elle King. I'm f--king hammered." Entering a "therapeutic program" after, she also apologized to Parton, who accepted her service and devotion. "Elle is really a great artist, she's a great girl," Parton told ExtraTV. "She's been going through a lot of things lately, and she just had a little too much to drink."

Feb. 5: She can buy her own flowers, write her own acceptance speech, too. And when Miley Cyrus failed to mention dad Billy Ray Cyrus while winning her first two Grammys (including Record of the Year), it launched endless rumors about a potential family rift. 

Feb. 26: Is it too late for Stephen Baldwin to say sorry? Because Hailey Bieber's dad caused quite the hysteria when he shared an Instagram reel originally posted by All Things Possible Ministry founder Victor Marx. "Christians, please when you think of Justin & Hailey, take a moment to offer a little prayer for them to have wisdom, protection and to draw close to the Lord," Marx wrote over a video of Justin Bieber playing the guitar. "There are special challenges that folks in high visibility positions face."

With endless fans asking what did he mean, the couple didn't address speculation. But they did welcome son Jack six months later. 

March 3: Nearly five months after Joshua Jackson and Lupita Nyong'o sparked romance rumors with a concert date, the pair decided they didn't want to wait to confirm their relationship, hard launching their union with a PDA-heavy Mexican vacation. Though fans said a little prayer for them and their romance, they confirmed their split in October. 

March 8: The case of Riley Strain—the 22-year-old University of Missouri student who vanished after a night of bar-hopping in Nashville—ended in tragedy. Two weeks after he was last spotted getting kicked out of Luke Bryan's bar, Luke 32 Food + Drink his body was pulled out of the Cumberland River, roughly eight miles away from where he started out.

With Strain's family continuously pressing for answers and even ordering their own autopsy ("If he fell and truly fell in the water and you can prove that to me, show me," his stepdad Chris Whiteid said) they got them in June. An autopsy report obtained by TMZ attributed Strain's official cause of death to drowning and ethanol intoxication (also known as alcohol poisoning), with the manner cited as accidental. 

March 10: What better place to debut the start of something new? Vanessa Hudgens turned her Academy Awards hosting gig on ABC's The Oscars Red Carpet Show into a pregnancy announcement. Four months later, the High School Musical alum and baseball player Cole Tucker welcomed their first baby. 

March 10: We'll have what Meg Ryan's having. When the actress made a rare appearance at Vanity Fair's post-Oscars fete (after son Jack Quaid's Oppenheimer took home the night's top prize) it was like...magic. 

March 13: Investigation Discovery's doc Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV lived up to its title. Not only did it detail the difficult working conditions under producer Dan Schneider, who worked on Nickelodeon shows including All That, The Amanda Show, Zoey 101, iCarly and Victorious, but it also saw Drake Bell come forward as the unnamed minor involved in the 2004 sexual assault conviction of Brian Peck, who was hired as an acting and dialogue coach for season two of All That. 

March 14: Okay, it's not quite a million-dollar smile. But when JoJo Siwa was asked about the most expensive part of her look on the 2024 GLAAD Media Awards red carpet, she revealed to Buzzfeed, "My teeth. These motherf--kers cost me 50 grand." Naturally, she wasn't satisfied with anything from the bottom of the proverbial pyramid, telling fans during a 2023 livestream that she "picked out the whitest color." 

March 27: Sure, we were three years late to the party, but we still raised a glass to the news that conjoined twin Abby Hensel—star of TLC's Abby & Brittany—wed self-described "father, veteran, nurse" Josh Bowling in 2021. Her sister Brittany Hensel remains single. 

"We are totally different people," Brittany explained in their 2007 documentary. "We usually bargain with each other like, ‘If you do this, I'll do that.' Or we take turns."

April 10: Sentiments were mixed after O.J. Simpson—the NFL running back whose trial for the 1994 murders of ex Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman captivated the nation—died at age 76 following a battle with cancer. But Caitlyn Jenner, who was previously wed to Nicole's close pal Kris Jenner, made her feelings clear, writing on X April 11, "Good Riddance."

April 11: Stepping out for the Broadway premiere of The Outsiders, producer Angelina Jolie and daughter Vivienne Jolie-Pitt—an assistant on the Tony-winning show, she was credited as Vivienne Jolie in the playbill—proved they were definitely a part of the in-crowd. 

"Viv reminds me of my mother in that she isn't focused on being the center of attention but in being a support to other creatives," the actress told E! News last August. "She's very thoughtful and serious about theatre and working hard to best understand how to contribute."

April 11: When Scottish comedian Richard Gadd took to the stage to spill his personal horror story, he couldn't have predicted Baby Reindeer—the resulting based-on-a-true-story scripted series—would become Netflix's No. 1 show in the U.S. and U.K., launching  a viral conversation about trauma, stalking, privacy and the perils of posing a mystery that Internet sleuths will feel compelled to solve.

"It's clearly struck a chord," Gadd told The Guardian after the premiere. "I really did believe in it, but it's taken off so quickly that I do feel a bit windswept."

April 12: Every rose has its thorn. And Golden Bachelor duo Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist felt that painful prick just three months after their televised January vows. 

The newlyweds largely blamed the distance between them in their initial split announcement, with Turner remaining in Indiana and Nist based in New Jersey despite plans to move to South Carolina. But Turner offered an alternate reason in December, telling People he opened up about his battle with bone marrow cancer Waldenström's macroglobulinemia because he felt it would "clear up a lot of mystery" about the end of his brief marriage. 

"As Theresa and I were trying very hard to find our lifestyle and where we were going to live and how we were going to make our life work, I was unfortunately diagnosed with cancer," he explained, noting the news made him re-evaluate his life and want to spend more time near his daughters and granddaughters. 

But Nist told the mag, her then-husband's diagnosis "wasn't a factor in the ending of the relationship, at least not for me."

"If that was something on his part, maybe, I don't know," she continued. "But no, that didn't factor into ending the relationship."

April 13: Admittedly, Megan Fox was a bit blindsided by the hysteria that ensued when Love Is Blind's Chelsea Blackwell said in the pods that people sometimes say she resembles the Transformers actress.

"I've never had more people text me about something," Fox exclusively told E! News' The Rundown host Erin Lim Rhodes at the 2024 Revolve Festival. And though the actress wasn't a devoted viewer of the Netflix series, "I did see a picture of her," she added. "A hundred thousand percent, people have told her, 'You kind of look like Megan Fox.' So I believe she's telling the truth and I hope, like, she still has that sparkle in her eye. I hope the world didn't steal it from her."

April 19: Proving she can, in fact, do it with a broken heart, Swift made her 11th studio disc, The Tortured Poets Department, a surprise double album stacked with 31 immediately beloved tracks. She sold 1.4 million copies the first day, smashed a series of records and then returned to her wildly successful Eras Tour. 

April 30: Though Mark Consuelos and wife Kelly Ripa are known for their steamy confessions, fans were still floored when the actor decided to kiss a stranger and tell his wife about it on-air. While celebrating the championship victory of Italy's Campobasso 1919 soccer team, which the couple co-own, he shared what he called a "passionate" smooch with a random woman. 

"We look at each other and we're so excited," he recalled on Live with Kelly and Mark, "and there's this glass and we come to the glass, and you know what? I kissed her." As for Ripa, she paid the moment little lip service, asking only, "Do we have footage?"