In 2024, television experienced some setbacks: soulless reboots appeared or were announced every few weeks; it became more difficult to distinguish reality TV from reality TV; and the simultaneous strikes by Hollywood writers and actors shut down productions while exposing issues that lower the caliber of the shows produced.
While returning titles challenged our preconceptions about where their plots would go and how they would end, other shows pushed the boundaries of episodic storytelling, and all of them proved to be worthwhile viewing-keeping us convinced that we should stay tuned to whatever the medium brings us next. Still, the list below exemplifies the small screen’s creative breadth this year.
1. Reservation Dogs (FX/Hulu)
This FX-produced Hulu series, helmed by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, has finished its graceful three-season evolution from a boisterous comedy about four Indigenous teens desperate to escape their remote Oklahoma reservation into TV’s most soulful half-hour about the importance of community and intergenerational connection. Reservation Dogs has transformed into an ensemble vision that knows no bounds, capable of effortlessly switching between a flashback set in the 1970s, a mental hospital heist, a foolish fishing excursion imparting masculine rituals, and an intensely moving reunion between a daughter and her absentee father.
2. Succession (HBO)
How do you wrap up a show that questioned the viability of its premise for its whole run? Until the show’s fourth and final season, media magnate Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) never really left his position, constantly impeding the attempts of his four adult children to vie for dominance. The show forced the Roy siblings to repeatedly confront each other’s vices because of the gap between Logan’s unwavering control and the futures that his children imagined for their family business.
Season 4, by contrast, brought them together in the face of tragedy. Watching them rally around one another in grief rather than greed boggled the mind, but the show succeeded in puncturing some of their characteristic narcissism. Still, their post-mourning solidarity could last only so long: As the series drew toward its epic conclusion, it became clear that the Roy siblings would always return to their trademark nastiness and caustic wit—even without their father as an obvious adversary. Once again, Succession managed, in offensively lavish environments, to extract new meaning and heightened drama from its cyclical character studies. The rot, as ever, came from within.
3. The Bear (Hulu)
CHUCK HODES/FX The first season of the FX-produced half-hour drama about a Chicago restaurant was gripping, even though nearly every scene was teeming with anxiety-inducing tension. For Season Two, The Bear eased up a little, letting Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and the rest of the cast enjoy the process of turning their Italian beef sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment. There was still a lot of tension, especially in the guest-packed Christmas flashback episode and the season finale.
However, there were also plenty of amazing moments of joy, such as Marcus (Lionel Boyce) traveling to Copenhagen to perfect his dessert-making craft and Richie taking an apprenticeship at the best restaurant in the world. A show that masters mood, both positive and negative.
4. Beef (Netflix)
Anger permeates Beef, a searing half-hour comedy about a road rage incident that escalates into an unstoppable feud. But the show was not just shocking set pieces and characters screaming at one another; it was a rather thoughtful exploration of our instinct—and even need—for outrage. Amy (Ali Wong), a wealthy entrepreneur with a nuclear family, is afraid of tarnishing her impeccable reputation as a girl boss who has it all, and Danny (Steven Yeun), a contractor taking care of his younger brother, lives paycheck to paycheck and has developed a tough front to survive.
Until they crossed paths in traffic, neither of them had anywhere to vent their pent-up resentment. While it may be painful to witness their attempts to damage the lives of others, Beef revealed a harsh reality: sometimes, nothing motivates people more than pure rage.
5. Wrestlers (Netflix)
Greg Whiteley isn’t on the radar of most TV critics, but he has developed and refined one of TV’s most reliable formulas through Cheer and the Last Chance U franchise. It’s a documentary structure that blends underdog sports tropes with complex portraits of real people clinging to sports as their last chance at the American Dream. With the Ohio Valley Wrestling promotion, Whiteley found perhaps the perfect vehicle for his formula, focusing on a troupe of play-acting pugilists blurring the lines between the people they dream of being and the people they pretend to be when they step into the ring.
Wrestlers make you laugh and then cry with their astounding access to subjects that are as outrageous in their candor as they are theatrical. You begin thinking, “Of course, it is all fake!” and then discover seven episodes full of painful truths about our desires and the lengths we will go to to get attention.
6. Poker Face (Peacock)
Glass Onion writer/director Rian Johnson collaborated with Natasha Lyonne, creator and star of Russian Doll, to create a delightfully clever throwback to Seventies TV mystery dramas like Columbo and Banacek. Each episode begins with a murder being committed, then zooms in to reveal that Lyonne’s character, Charlie Cale, who has the uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying, was lurking around the periphery during the earlier scenes. Naturally, Cale solves the crime each week, proving that the only issue with the standalone procedural format is that people stopped making them this well.
7. I am a Virgo (Amazon)
If Beef is not the most 2023 show, then Boots Riley’s blend of bizarre urban fairy tale, superhero origin story, and straight-up Marxist critique—delivered via Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, of all places—certainly is. Riley creates a magical conceit through puppetry, miniatures, and other technical whimsy instruments, and in a performance of heartbreaking innocence, Jharrel Jerome plays a sheltered young man realizing that modern Oakland is no place for a 13-foot-tall Black teenager. All of this is grounded in righteous anger directed toward income inequality and systemic racial injustice.
Otherwise, it is just a fun show with Walton Goggins as a billionaire supervillain, star-making turns from Kara Young and Olivia Washington, and some of the most bizarre sex scenes you will ever see. It is enraged.
8. Abbott Elementary (ABC)
The teachers there are going through growing pains too, which is part of the secret to the sitcom’s sustained success. Its second season avoided the sophomore slump by balancing serious struggles at an underfunded school with silly workplace antics, as well as by examining how its characters were still striving to become true role models for their young charges.
Everyone at Abbott, from the conceited principal Ava (Janelle James) to the wonderfully dry janitor Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis), had a lot to learn from each other and the students. The main reason Abbott Elementary achieved success beyond passing grades was because these life skills were infused with a healthy dose of humor.
9. The Last of Us (HBO)
LIANE HENTSCHER/HBO Video game adaptations for film and television have not always had the best creative track record. However, with Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin’s post-apocalyptic game, The Last of Us, which was already known for being more cinematic and having much deeper characterizations than almost any game before it, the translation went incredibly well, especially with the casting of Pedro Pascal as a grieving father given a second chance at life by protecting a teenage girl (Bella Ramsey), who has the potential to be the key to curing the plague that has turned most of humanity into zombie-like mushroom creatures.
The entire time, Pascal and Ramsey held viewers’ attention – and in a special episode about how love can still exist in this kind of destroyed world, guest stars Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett even more so. Moreover, The Last of Us consistently felt more like a gripping drama with video game roots than a program that was attempting, unsuccessfully, to replicate the sensation of playing the game itself.
10. Dark Winds (AMC)
After dedicating its first season to the exposition and establishing the Leaphorn and Chee characters from Tony Hillerman’s novels, AMC’s Dark Winds came into its own with a layered and strikingly efficient six-episode season. The mystery was tighter and more resonant, the Southwestern locations captured with iconic relish, and, more than ever, Dark Winds made this clear: Zahn McClarnon is a STAR, all-caps required. It’s not that he isn’t surrounded by a capable ensemble—Kiowa Gordon and especially Jessica Matten keep improving—but McClarnon’s screen presence is limitless. He’s funny when required, tormented as needed, and, in a show driven by its main character’s inquisitiveness, a marvel when it comes to being still yet intellectually curious.
Get ready for a few months of this from me—the 2024 lead actor in a drama Emmy category is going to have a bunch of empty slots, and if voters don’t latch on to what McClarnon is doing here, it’ll be disgraceful. Between Dark Winds, Reservation Dogs, and his amusing History of the World, Part II guest turn, McClarnon is my TV performer of the year.
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