When we gathered here last December to discuss the best TV shows of 2023, I noted that the year felt like something of an end of an era. A group of beloved critical darlings like Succession, Barry, and Reservation Dogs, among others, all wrapped up their runs. And between the impact of last year’s simultaneous writers’ and actors’ strikes, plus the business as a whole beginning to contract from the unsustainable output of the Peak TV era, it was clear we were going to get much less TV — and perhaps much less of the truly great kind — moving forward.
This proved to be the case, at least for 2024. There were fewer overall shows, as the business was very slow to ramp up in the aftermath of the strikes. The year wasn’t nearly as deep in obvious classics as we’ve had of late — and of the shows on this year’s Top 10 list, two are in their own final seasons, and one is a miniseries that was discarded by its previous home and seems unlikely to continue in any form.
But these 10 shows were nonetheless superb, and offer up a wide range of pleasures, from sweeping historical epics to plotless hangout comedies, from well-executed franchise reboots to wildly idiosyncratic originals. Whatever this new era in television turns out to be, we’re not done with excellence yet.
10. True Detective: Night Country (HBO)
Michele K. Short/HBO
Though the third season of True Detective was a rebound from the crime anthology’s disastrous second installment, no one was exactly clamoring for its return over the past five years. But with a new showrunner in Issa López, a stark new setting in a small Alaskan town at the start of a period of perpetual darkness, and Jodie Foster as the new lead, the newly-subtitled series came back to riveting life. As Foster’s misanthropic sheriff Liz Danvers and her guarded former protégé Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) investigated multiple deaths at a remote research laboratory, Night Country took full advantage of its strange locale, and deftly balanced matters real and supernatural.
9. My Brilliant Friend (HBO)
HBO
From its first season through this year’s fourth and final, the Italian series has carefully straddled the line between epic and intimate. It beautifully recreated Naples from the Fifties through the Nineties, offering shocking violence and spectacle along the way. But primarily, it found its power and beauty in the tiny moments along the complicated path of friendship traveled by childhood friends Elena and Lila — played as middle-aged women this time around by Alba Rohrwacher and Irene Maiorino. It belongs in any conversation about the best dramas to ever appear on HBO.
8. A Man on the Inside (Netflix)
Netflix
The most recent show on this list is also perhaps the warmest and wisest of the year. The Good Place creator Mike Schur reunited with Good Place star Ted Danson for an unlikely adaptation: a sitcom based on the documentary The Mole Agent, about a Chilean senior citizen who went undercover in a nursing home to help a private detective on a case — potential elder abuse in the film, an alleged jewel theft on the show. But the shift in both format and stakes works, because Schur treats various questions of senior citizen life with utter sincerity, and because he’s really using the mystery as an excuse to force Danson’s lonely widower back out into the world, into a circumstance where he’ll have to make new friends and confront regrets about the death of his beloved wife. Danson proved as game and versatile as ever, and Schur surrounded him with a cast of older character actors (Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sally Struthers, John Getz, Susan Ruttan) who were all clearly energized to be at the center of a story about this stage of life. A joy all around, even in the sad parts.
7. Fantasmas (HBO)
Atsushi Nishijima/HBO
Fantasmas is an easy show to describe in conception, and a difficult one to grasp in execution. The structure of it makes a certain amount of sense: Julio (played by the show’s creator, Julio Torres) is a young writer and performer who’s struggling to find a niche in this world, and the series toggles between stories about his struggles and more sketch-like material that seems drawn from the imagination of both Julios. But the nature of Julio’s “reality” and fantasy are both so delightfully strange, it’s hard to find the line where one ends and the other begins. By the time you recognize that, you’ll be so absorbed in, and amused by, Torres’ idiosyncratic worldview that you won’t worry about trying to make sense of any of it.
6. Shrinking (Apple TV+)
Beth Dubber/Apple TV+
Shrinking never entirely forgets that it’s a show about a man (Jason Segel’s unconventional therapist Jimmy) struggling with grief over the loss of his wife. This second season even introduced the series’ co-creator, Brett Goldstein, in a poignant recurring role as the man understandably consumed with guilt over killing Jimmy’s wife in a drunk driving accident. But somehow, in the midst of material about that, about Jimmy’s mentor Paul (Harrison Ford) dealing with the advancing symptoms of Parkinson’s, and other heavy subject matter, Shrinking remains among the lightest, loosest, and most purely fun shows to hang out with that we have.
5. What We Do in the Shadows (FX)
Russ Martin/FX
The raunchy vampire mockumentary has saved some of its very best for last. Shadows was for most of its run very judicious about how much its idiotic bloodsuckers would interact with modern human life and pop culture. In this final season, with no creative future to worry about, the series has leaned way into that material, with hilarious storylines where Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) gets a job at a shady finance company, Laszlo (Matt Berry) sees his human friend Sean freaking out during March Madness and assumes he’s been possessed by a demon, and Nandor (Kayvan Novak) becomes a production assistant on a police procedural filming in the neighborhood. But there’s still plenty of vamp-specific material, like a brilliant farce in which Laszlo, Nandor, Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) each realize they can hypnotize the others in their sleep, with escalating consequences. Ordinarily, the idea of shows saying goodbye before they begin to stumble is the right one. But this season has been so great, somebody ought to try sleep hypnotizing the creative team into making more.
4. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Prime)
David Lee/Prime Video
We continue into the reboots and remakes portion of this list (remember, Shadows is a spinoff of a Taika Waititi-Jemaine Clement film) with what seemed like a wholly unnecessary adaptation of the 2005 Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt action comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But co-creators Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane mostly used the brand name to invert the movie’s premise, this time showing a pair of freelance spies (Glover and Maya Erskine) who are total strangers before they’re hired to pose as a married couple as cover for various globe-trotting assignments. This opposite approach turned out to be a fiendishly clever way to look at the complexities and compromises of marriage, whether real or fake. As these strangers found themselves falling in love for real, Glover and Erskine’s chemistry sparkled, and both proved equally adept at the more slapstick end of the show’s range and the genuinely serious and sad moments. Amazon has ordered another season, though it’s unclear if it will involve a new couple or more of these two. Either way, this was a delight.
3. Ripley (Netflix)
Netflix
If revisiting Mr. & Mrs. Smith seemed like an odd choice, offering a new, series-length take on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley just seems like folly, given the genius of the 1999 movie version with Matt Damon and Jude Law. (The show was even abandoned by its original home, Showtime, and picked up for a song by Netflix, though the streaming giant doesn’t seem interested in adapting other Highsmith books.) But writer-director Steve Zaillian’s chilly, methodical take on the material — taking us step-by-step through the various cons and murders committed by an older, less sympathetic Tom Ripley (so well played by Andrew Scott) — made this familiar story feel new again. And the black and white photography by Zaillian and cinematographer Robert Elswit offered some of the most stunning imagery ever seen in dramatic television.
2. Shōgun (Hulu)
Katie Yu/FX
James Clavell’s historical epic about a civil war in feudal Japan was already made into a TV miniseries back in 1980. But that one so fundamentally misunderstood its source material that the story was told predominantly from the point of view of the English sailor caught in the middle of things, and the Japanese dialogue wasn’t even subtitled in its original airings. This FX-produced take, adapted by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, understood immediately that this was a Japanese story, and that John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) should be treated as the wild card, rather than the full deck. The scope was frequently jaw-dropping, as were the performances — particularly by Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, and Tadanobu Asano — and the whole season built to an unforgettable climax. By the end, Kondo and Marks had adapted nearly all of the book. Now, they’ll attempt to continue the story without the source material, and have earned that right with how expertly they’ve dealt with these characters so far.
1. Somebody Somewhere (HBO)
Sandy Morris/HBO
As television enters its first year of getting smaller after years of rampant expansion, what could more appropriately top this list than this tiny little gem of a show, in which barely anything happens, but in a way that can be so emotionally overwhelming, it feels like everything has happened? The third and final season of Somebody Somewhere found Bridget Everett’s Sam struggling to see everyone else’s lives changing while hers remains stuck in neutral. Best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller) moves in with boyfriend Brad (Tim Bagley), wild pal Fred (Murray Hill) is domesticated by marriage, and her retired parents’ farm is rented out by a mysterious Icelandic man with a name she can’t pronounce (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson). But as was true throughout this gorgeous run, the series cared less about trying to solve Sam’s problems than sketching out her life and the lives of her friends. It did this in such knowing detail that it felt less like we were watching a TV dramedy than like we had somehow been deposited at a karaoke bar in Manhattan, Kansas, to spend time with Sam, her sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison), Joel, and the rest of the crew. Probably made for less than half the cost of the House of the Dragon wig budget, Somebody Somewhere could have easily run for many more years without even David Zaslav’s accountant noticing. Just treasure that we got these 21 remarkable episodes of it.
From Rolling Stone US.
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