One of the greatest pleasures of the Peak TV era was that an excellent series could come from almost anywhere. Lifetime could greenlight the smart, satirical thriller You (which would become a hit for Netflix after failing to attract an audience on cable). The lyrical coming-of-age saga David Makes Man could find a home on OWN. TNT could serve up madcap Floridian crime soap Claws while BBC America made Killing Eve an obsession on this side of the Atlantic.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]A few years into the industry’s contraction, and in the wake of writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023, the television landscape looks a lot different. Many of the above cable networks have turned away from expensive scripted originals. While second-generation streaming platforms like Peacock and Paramount+ have theoretically emerged to take their place, those services are mostly spewing out reality-TV filler, uninspired revivals of IP owned by the legacy studios that own their copyrights, and imported titles of varying quality. Starz, Showtime, and just about every other premium cable channel that isn’t HBO have gotten lost amid so many bigger brands vying for subscription dollars. Apple TV+ stands as a well-funded haven for ambitious ideas, yet its executives seem too dazzled by celebrity-led projects to do much quality control.
And so, in taking stock of 2024’s best television, we’re left with the usual suspects—the vanguard of the TV renaissance that began at the turn of the 21st century: HBO, FX, and, to a lesser extent, the embattled AMC. (Netflix releases so much content that its presence on this list, albeit with a British sleeper hit and a low-budget indie show that it licensed, was inevitable.) I’m conscious of the dearth of platform diversity in this list, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Maybe it’s this climate of scarcity that has drawn me to some of the year’s most lavish spectacles. Three of them, Pachinko, The Sympathizer, and Shōgun, have a lot in common, from historical settings and literary source material to multilingual scripts and almost entirely Asian casts, but each also has a voice all its own. Interview with the Vampire isn’t just grand; it’s maximalist, in an emotional as well as an aesthetic sense. Industry and Say Nothing, two very different shows, immerse us in the chaos of (respectively) global finance and revolutionary politics. With the inclusion of these titles along with a handful of the much smaller, stranger, more personal series that I usually gravitate towards—Baby Reindeer, Somebody Somewhere, Penelope, Fantasmas—this list is intended as both a celebration of television’s potential for excellence on any scale and a rejection of the “mid TV” mediocrity we too often see instead.
Creator Soo Hugh made one choice, in the first season of Pachinko, that I found baffling. Instead of preserving the chronological structure of Min Jin Lee’s sweeping novel about a 20th century Korean family, she paired the opening chapters—which take heroine Sunja (played as a young woman by Minha Kim and later by Yoon Yuh Jung) from her childhood in a fishing village to her early adulthood as an immigrant in Japan—with an expanded story following Sunja’s finance-guy grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha), in the ’80s. In alternating between two bookends, the series left a void at the heart of the story. Season 2 fills in the book’s powerful middle chapters, which trace Sunja’s conflicted relationship with her secret lover turned guardian angel, Mr. Koh (Lee Min-ho), during World War II. Hugh weaves together the family’s struggles with a fresh perspective on a conflict that made Korean immigrants suffer for their occupier’s aggression, while also deepening the first season’s depiction of Solomon wrestling with his identity, history, ambition, and future. A tale that pits survival against self-sacrifice and legacy against self-determination, this season of Pachinko doesn’t just do justice to the contemporary classic on which it’s based; it forges new connections and finds new revelations across generations.
No one was placing bets on a trauma-driven dramedy adapted from an unknown Scottish creator’s semi-autobiographical Edinburgh Fringe Festival show to become Netflix’s big 2024 breakout. In fact, the platform barely promoted Baby Reindeer in the U.S. But such is the magic of Netflix, which through some unique combination of algorithmic wizardry and word-of-mouth virality has the power to spawn global hits nobody saw coming. Now the show’s mastermind and star, Richard Gadd, is a household name with an armload of awards and an HBO series in the works. It couldn’t have happened to a more compelling voice. Nominally a crime drama that fictionalizes his ordeal with a female stalker (Jessica Gunning), his sui generis series is really a journey into a wounded psyche, dissecting everything from Gadd’s self-involvement to his history with a sexually abusive mentor to his inability to commit to a trans woman (Nava Mau) who is probably too good for him. All three major performances are breakthroughs. Also: It’s funny.
Yes, it casts one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Robert Downey, Jr., in a quadruple role that collectively represents white supremacy. And yes, he’s great, chomping scenery as he spoofs ‘70s icons like Francis Ford Coppola and Hunter S. Thompson. But what’s really remarkable about Park Chan-wook’s wild, epic, visually stunning, manically referential, simultaneously hilarious and gutting adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen is its insight into the Vietnam War, a cataclysm that has shaped identities both Vietnamese and American. Grounded in the chronically ambivalent perspective of the Captain (a note-perfect Hoa Xuande), The Sympathizer spans continents as it reckons with what it means to commit to a cause and how a society survives colonialism, war, and internal schism. Not enough people tuned in to the series when it aired, this past spring. Maybe it sounded like a slog. Actually, it’s electrifying—and there’s no better time to engage with it than during our nation’s anxious holiday interregnum.
Genre shows are everywhere—they’re practically the only originals we get from platforms like Disney+ and Prime Video—yet few do justice to the IP on which they’re usually based. Interview With the Vampire, the flagship title in AMC’s Anne Rice franchise, is the rare reboot that has something new to offer. What began as the warped saga of conflicted vampire Louis (Jacob Anderson) and his abusive but devoted maker, Lestat (Sam Reid) evolved, in this year’s second season, into TV’s most bizarre love triangle, as we got to know Louis’ mysteriously powerful current beau, Armand (Assad Zaman). A capital-R Romantic spirit suffuses creator Rolin Jones’ production, which feels emotionally immersive in ways that so much recent entertainment for adults is not. From its evocative postwar-Paris flashbacks to the diabolical twists that kept fans screaming with each new episode, Interview might be 2024’s most purely pleasurable show.
For a few years, at the very peak of Peak TV, you couldn’t browse a streaming-service menu without stumbling upon a witty, wise, alternately warm and wry slice-of-life show whose modest scale belied its universal insight. Better Things. Work in Progress. Betty. Vida. Back to Life. Please Like Me. Sort Of. One of the last such series left standing—until its Dec. 8 finale—is Somebody Somewhere, which casts New York alt-cabaret doyenne Bridget Everett as a single, unmoored, middle-aged woman in small-town Kansas. A celebration of friendships that become chosen families and intrafamilial feuds that resolve into friendships, it’s a show that illustrates how finding community can, slowly but indelibly, change a person’s life. Its third and final season, which finds Everett’s Sam flirting with romance as her pals Joel (Jeff Hiller) and Fred (Murray Hill) settle down with partners of their own, poignantly captures the familiar fear that everyone in your life is moving forward while you stay stuck in the same stunted place.
When reality feels like a fever dream, surreal stories can hit harder than realism. Hence the haunting humor of Fantasmas, an unconventional sketch comedy about art and survival from the infinite imagination of Julio Torres (Los Espookys, Problemista). The show’s fantastical vignettes feature what is easily the year’s most delightful guest star lineup: Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Bowen Yang, executive producer Emma Stone, and more. But what has stuck with me is the frame narrative starring Torres as Julio, a creative wunderkind living in a violet-hued, alternate-universe New York, whose nebulous career includes gigs like pitching new crayon shades. When a health scare and landlord trouble throw his life into precarity, Julio’s situation is exacerbated by his refusal to obtain an invasive new form of ID called Proof of Existence. His only other option is to earn enough money, through selling dumb TV-show ideas about his gay and Latino identities, to live on his own terms. His predicament may be absurd, but as a metaphor for the artist’s endless battle against bureaucracy, mediocrity, and poverty—not to mention a sharp commentary on the current TV landscape—it makes perfect sense.
It says nothing good about the state of television that filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass, who created Penelope with Mel Eslyn, pitched the series around but wound up producing it independently (an unusual model for TV) when no platform would bite. Thankfully, Netflix did license the final product—a dreamlike half-hour drama that follows a teenage girl (a magnetic Megan Stott) who abruptly abandons her life of high school and social media to rough it in Cascade National Forest. While it is, in part, a survival story, Penelope’s journey, rendered in vibrant shades of green and generous with moments of silence, is best understood as a spiritual pilgrimage. Like Thoreau, she goes to the woods to live deliberately; what she experiences there recalls both Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Christ’s sojourn through the desert. The result is a show that, in immersing us in its heroine’s search for meaning, invites our introspection as well.
What happened to Jean McConville, the widowed mother of 10 who disappeared, in 1972, after being dragged by a masked mob from her Belfast home? This is the question that ostensibly drives FX’s adaptation of the acclaimed nonfiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe. But Keefe’s story is no simple potboiler, and Say Nothing bears little resemblance to the typical true-crime drama. Morally astute, rich in layered characters and insightful performances, and perceptive about how a person’s moral calculus can change over the course of a lifetime, the series filters four decades’ worth of the Troubles through the experience of Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew), an IRA agitator who spent her later life (in which she’s played by Maxine Peake) haunted by the extreme actions she participated in as a young woman. The show’s true question is more like: Who benefits from political violence, and who becomes its collateral damage? And the answers it suggests are anything but easy.
Industry has always been better than its reputation as that show where arrogant young finance employees in London snort coke, sleep around, and take reckless risks with staggering sums of money. (To be fair, that description is not technically incorrect.) But with this year’s third season, amid HBO’s conspicuous efforts to position it as a successor to Succession, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s propulsive drama leveled up to become one of TV’s shrewdest commentaries on the times in which we’re living. Opening with the calamitous IPO of a green-energy startup managed by the series’ fictional banking giant, Pierpoint & Co., the season took a scalpel to the hypocrisy-prone phenomenon of socially conscious capitalism. At the same time, it zoomed in on some of its most compelling characters: haunted heiress Yasmin (Marisa Abela), cutthroat company man Eric (Ken Leung), toxic striver Rishi (Sagar Radia). Taken together, the individual storylines and the overarching plot demonstrate how, in an environment like Pierpoint, when self-interest conflicts with loyalty, decency, or any other virtue, selfishness always wins.
An artistic triumph. A record-breaking 18 Emmy wins. An all-time viewership high for FX. Two more seasons in development for a title that was planned as a limited series. By just about every conceivable measure, Shōgun is the TV success story of 2024. Yet it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the network’s $200 million bet—on a largely Japanese-language production that was also the second high-profile adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 best seller about a 17th century English sailor (Cosmo Jarvis) who washes up in Japan and finds himself at the mercy of a politically isolated feudal lord (Hiroyuki Sanada)—was going to pay off.
But, at a time when American audiences are assumed to have fragmented along demographic and partisan lines, creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo scored a megahit the old-fashioned way: by offering something precious to every kind of viewer. For the Game of Thrones crowd, there was vividly rendered combat and, more importantly, intricate political intrigue. For prestige-TV types, heady themes of faith, honor, self-sacrifice, and culture shock. For history buffs, a deep dive into a pivotal period of Japanese history and the uneasy relationship between East and West. Unlike its predecessor, this Shōgun gives us a fully realized female character in Anna Sawai’s canny, conflicted noblewoman, Toda Mariko. There’s even a slow-burning love story. And you’d be hard-pressed to find another show that so stunningly combines lush visuals, masterly performances, and an expressive original score (from Atticus and Leopold Ross). As streamers increasingly turn away from ambitious projects, in their desperation to get out of the red, I hope Shōgun will resonate across the industry as a reminder that fortune favors the bold.
