The week of the presidential election, my 12-year-old daughter and I argued over when the next episode of “High Potential,” a crime drama we realized we’d each been avidly watching without the other knowing, would air. Our ignorance stemmed from how we consumed it: She streamed it on the family-friendly Disney, and I on the adult-leaning Hulu, which also meant we caught new episodes after they premiered on ABC. Without a singular broadcast to bring us together, we had different viewing experiences.

After we figured it out (it’s Tuesdays), I began to think about the other implications of our debate. Outside of the Super Bowl, very few events on television or elsewhere constitute a national pastime. Practically, this means that most of the year we have limited opportunities to form similar perspectives or create a standard prism through which we can interpret our culture and, by extension, our fellow citizens.

And while a lot of this year’s best entertainment has explored such divisions, I’ve been drawn to works that delve into the hyperlocal — settings that serve as animating forces or determinants of boundaries — to broaden what we think of as the universal.

‘Cowboy Carter’

According to Spotify, I listened to this album 29 days in a row, a streak that surprised even me. Though she refers to it as a “Beyoncé album” rather than a genre-specific country album, “Cowboy Carter” is one of the most personal of her albums, behind only “Lemonade.” That’s partly because the music, a mix of country, R&B, down-home blues and zydeco, is inherently nostalgic for and pulls from the sounds she heard growing up in Houston, where she attended and later sang at the Houston Rodeo.

It is also a throwback in other ways: Beyoncé used live instruments including the harmonica or Hammond organ, as well as natural sounds such as handclaps, horseshoe steps and even her nails. But, her biggest intervention was taking racist revisions to history head-on and reminding us that country music began as and continues to be Black music. Recognizing pioneers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Linda Martell, and featuring present-day Black country music singers, “Cowboy Carter” made history of its own. It was the first album by a Black woman to top Billboard’s Country Albums chart and is tied with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as the most-nominated Grammy album.