Best new show:
Shōgun
Shōgun sends British navigator John Blackthorne (a great Cosmo Jarvis) to "The Japans", a country closed for trade to anyone but the Portuguese, who have been busy converting the local population to Catholicism. As soon as he arrives, the complexities of power and culture perplex him, but his abilities put him right at the center of a power struggle between the five regents who are leading the country after the death of the Taikō, since his son is still too young to rule. Shōgun 's writing is staggering, especially when it portrays women who are struggling to carve out a little power for themselves in a world that affords them little. Anna Sawai, Blackthorne's assigned translator, is fantastic (she has the greatest arc of the show), as are Moeka Hoshi as Usami, grieving the death of her child but assigned to Blackthorne as a companion, and Fumi Nikaido as Ochiba no Kata, the consort of the late Taikō and mother of his son, who is scheming to control the regents for her own causes.
X-Men '97
I didn't grow up watching the original run of the animated X-Men show, so I went into this without any expectations: and then, like maybe a lot of other viewers, was deeply surprised by how ambitious and sad this first season was, how serious in tackling the traumatic destruction of a whole community, and the different reactions to it (how midway through, the show reaches the verdict that "Magneto was right"). Of all the Marvel offerings I've watched over the last few years (and I didn't even dislike The Marvels, which was sheer absurdism), this feels like the best and most mature.
Blue Eye Samurai
What a great year for animated shows this has been. Blue Eye Samurai is a tale about revenge, and about what it costs, in terms of humanity, to be so determined to avenge a past wrong. Blue Eye Samurai's protagonist is hunting three white men who have circumvented Japan's Shogunate era ban on their presence - one of them raped her mother. The animation is beautiful - this is the same Japan shown in Shogun, a few years in the future - and it is the rich cast of characters that makes the story so compelling, from courageous and true companion Ringo to the complex Akemi and Taigen, drawn into Mizu's quest. This is also a compelling tale about what heroism means and how shame limits and torments. I hope we'll get more seasons.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
I hadn't seen a single of the new Monsterverse films before starting Monarch, a show that follows the history of the secretive organisation tracing Godzilla, Kong and others, but fell in love with it quickly. The vibes remind me of the unfortunately cancelled Gotham Knights, a show that was great because of its focus on the dynamics between the core group and less so for its place in a wider mythology (maybe there is a soft spot in my heart for shows that have holes, that you can't probe too deeply with logic, but that are filled with newer variations of the Scooby Gang). Monarch is set in two different timelines - the 1950s, at the advent of Monarch, and in 2015, a year after what happens in the 2014 Godzilla that wreaked havoc on US soil. Both timelines have triangles - in the 50s, two scientists work together with an army officer and become the foundation of Monarch, in 2015, two half-siblings (who didn't know about each other) team up with a genius hacker (Kiersey Clemons, very good in Hearts Beat Loud) and uncover well-kept secrets. Both timelines are queer in their own way (dads! so much subtext!). I did catch up with the films and was surprised by how little they resemble the action fare that I was used to from watching in the late 90s/early 2000, how much these films are about perpetually missing or dead parents, structures confronted with something greater than them that they cannot fathom and inevitably meet with brute force, scientists deeply fascinated by what they find but thwarted by the military (if your only tool is a hammer, etc). I even felt a subtle connection between this and Scavengers Reign, another show about a group of people confronted with an overwhelming situation that reveals how individual people cope with a non-conquerable (and deeply unfamiliar) nature differently (awe/violence/pragmatism). The final episode of the first season is also one of the most moving episodes of television this year, carried profoundly by the performance of Mari Yamamoto, whose Keiko is the emotional center of the show.
Best one-season show:
This animated show is some of the best science fiction storytelling that I've watched maybe since The Expanse. The Demeter, a cargo ship, gets into trouble in orbit and some people evacuate in escape pods to a planet with a thriving and profoundly different ecosystem. The show tracks the progress of different groups who all have a diverging approach to the fauna and flora they encounter. The greatest thing about the show is how detailled its depiction of this weird world is, how it pictures animals and plants existing in an occasionally horrifying balance that creates a kind of otherworldly bodyhorror (especially Kamen's fate). This world is decisively not built for humans, and whether characters decide to make the best of it or fail in trying to conquer it decides their fate (again, not too unlike the polar regions!). The voice actors, from Wunmi Mosaku, Bob Stephenson, Sunita Mani to Alia Shawkat voicing a robot who begins to synthesise with the environment in interesting ways (my first good cry about television in 2024) are fantastic, as is the completely surprising appearance by Sepideh Moafi's (who has been great in everything she's ever been in) as Mia.
True Detective: Night Country
Agatha All Along
There have been a few moments in the last few years where Marvel films and television shows have surprised me. I'm a proponent of the earlier TV shows that didn't have to tie in with the films (Jessica Jones, Runaways, Cloak & Dagger) and that went to darker and weirder places than you'd maybe expect (especially Cloak & Dagger's final season was a trip and a half, in a good way). More recently, my enjoyment of Marvel stuff has entirely depended on how I felt about the main characters: I liked the Hawkeye TV show, Echo, and have a soft spot for She-Hulk because of how great Tatiana Maslany is. What I didn't expect was that a Marvel TV show that is meant to tie into the films could stray so far from what I had thought the conventions were post one big universe: Agatha All Along is a perfect, self-contained nine episodes of television, it's queer (and not in a subtextual way, for a change), it embraces the complexities of a villain (hard to call someone running a murder con anything else). Kathryn Hahn has been great for a long time (I think I first saw her in Crossing Jordan but the first time she really got stuck in my brain for how great an actress she is was in Transparent, in a small role that she made incredibly emotionally impactful with her talent), and she's the reason why Agatha All Along works (and was made in the first place), but the incredible thing about the show is how Joe Locke keeps pace with her perfectly without being overshadows by her or Aubrey Plaza (who is doing the most in a role that allows her to do so). The supporting performances by Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, Debra Jo Rupp and Patti LuPone (!) are oustanding. Surprised and delighted by how much care Jac Schaeffer has put into this, but also cautious about what anyone else would do with these characters once they have to fit into the wider universe.
Under the Bridge
I have a very low tolerance for true crime shows, but this one is a stand-out, maybe because it isn't that far off from the great Sharp Objects. Based on a book by Rebecca Godfrey, played by Riley Keogh in the show, it focuses on a group of mostly girls in 1997 Victoria who severely bullied and killed a teenager, starting a panic about mean girl violence. The stand-out is Lily Gladstone (fresh off of some kind of year), playing the acerbic cop on the case who cares more than her police department (made up of adoptive family members) - and the complex history she has with Godfrey and the history of her adoption as an indigenous child into a white cop family. Later episodes also feature stand-out performances by young Javon Walton as Warren, who forms a bond with Rebecca as she writes about the crime, and the always great Archie Panjabi, who plays Reena's grieving mom. I'm a bit on the fence on whether it is fair to use a real tragedy and shape it into something else for a TV show that takes a lot of license with the original story, but it's hard to resent the chemistry between Gladstone and Keogh.
Death and Other Details
I'm not sure if it is aging or just the specific pop-cultural conditions of Covid-times that make gentle mystery/detective shows so appealing. It feels like a 2020s version of Columbo or Murder She Wrote - between Rian Johnson's Poker Face and Knives Out/Glass Onion, Only Murders in the Building and Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot adaptations (which do sometimes veer delightfully weirder and darker), there's plenty to choose from. Death and Other Details is a locked room mystery set on a cruise ship filled with rich people and those who make their lives easier (the upstairs-downstairs aspect of guest vs crew is interesting to consider, maybe even a little bit of an homage to Agatha Christie, the queen of exactly that kind of mystery). The ship itself is a marvelous setting - it the lovingly restored obsession of owner Sunil (Rahul Kohli - forever Owen from Bly Manor to me, even after playing a diametrically opposed character in House of Usher, and therefore difficult to consider as a suspect). Washed up private detective Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin, always great) is trying to make up for the greatest error of his life, letting down young Imogene (played by Violett Beane as an adult), whose mother's murder he could not solve. There' something about the diverse cast that seems to be having a great time, and the emergence of a Scooby club (Angela Zhou and Pardis Saremi are delightful) of amateur detectives once some of them successfully manage to prove their innocence in a new murder on board. I was hooked when the show used a Poliça song, which felt like a wink that we are among friends here.
The Brothers Sun
Goodbye, Sweet Prince.
Best show:
We Are Lady Parts
Interview with the Vampire
I'm not entirely happy with how the show ended, how it revealed a greater betrayal and attempted to redeem a character, but Interview with the Vampire remains a fascinating, queer reclaiming of Anne Rice's original text, delivering on the potential that never quite came to fruition in the original. I loved Claudia's arc this season (Delainey Hayles takes on the mantle perfectly), who is desperately looking for community but is deeply disappointed (and constrained) once she finds it. There is also an interesting undercurrent here about complicity in violence in the aftermath of WW2 and the holocaust.
Industry
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin
Babylon Berlin
I've only managed to watch the fourth season of the show this year because it has been difficult to track down from abroad, and what a season it is! Somehow, Babylon Berlin always has so many balls in the air that it's impossible to see how it will all fit together in the end, like a storytelling version of the dance-athon that begins the season, or the grizzly methamphetamine experiments (reference: Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich) that Gedeon's brother is running. The underlying horror is always the fact that it is difficult to see how most of the characters will still be alive in ten years - what is coming is becoming more and more obvious, the mask is coming off, and it is becoming more and more obvious how undermined the institutions of the shaky German democracy truly are. War-hungry German nationalists cooperate with the rising national socialist movement, there is a fight within the movement between the bullies of the SA and the SS, there is rising outright antisemitism and racism (I dare anyone not to be deeply moved by one of the final scenes of the season - when Charlotte's half-brother, in the boxing ring, covers himself in chalk to respond to the racist bullying of the Nazis who are ringside, and KOs his opponent). It's an utterly breathless season yet again.
Also: Abbott Elementary, Only Murders in the Building, Hacks, The Bear, Pachinko
Evil
I'm late to the show, having watched some of season one and then never returned, but this is a companion piece to the also great Servant, both shows who seem unconstrained in terms of how weird they can get, and how much they are allowed to embrace unlimited creative freedom, which is such a rarity in the contemporary TV landscape. The main team of three is the driving force behind everything (a dynamic that reminds me of the lovely Leverage).I wish Andrea Martin, playing Sister Andrea, was more recognised for what can only be described as a stand-out performance in a show filled with them.
Arcane It's sad that Arcane was cut short, as the second and final season likely arrived at the same finishing point as a much longer run would have, which results in many storylines being rushed or cut for length - but this is still one of the most beautifully animated show I have ever watched, and a harrowing tale about the cost of a world divided by class. I wish that we had gotten more time to see the struggle between Zaun and Piltover (but what a time to show what an occupying force does to a terrorised population). Hailee Steinfeld, Ella Purnell (whose rise to stardom is obvious this year) and Katie Leung are fantastic as always.
And: Alia Shawkat is so good in The Old Man! It's maybe a truism that great actors who started off in comedies are likely to succeed in dramatic roles more than when the shift happens the other way (and Search Party was such an interesting showcase of her acting with how many different genres the show straddled across its seasons). She has a much more central role in the second season, where she has to make difficult choices after finding out her true identity. I'm also kind of amused by the fact that the dynamics of this show weirdly mirror Only Murders in the Building (which is also a riff on Grumpy Old Men).
American Rust is a very solid thriller/crime show, situated somewhere between The Sinner, Hightown and Ozark. I didn't really expect it to have a second season, and the stand-outs in terms of performance are David Alvarez and Julia Mayorga, playing siblings coping with the death of their father and their community as it deals with the arrival of a fracking company eager to make profits. I've loved Maura Tierney since ER, and Grace Poe is one of those characters for the ages, always caught between doing the right thing for everyone and caring for herself, a decision the show argues inevitably leads to moral greyness.
Beacon 23, a show that seems to have artistic freedom beyond what should be possible in 2024, makes full use of it in the second episode of the second season: like a futuristic, AI-version of Severance, Harmony (a fantastic Natasha Mumba) gets stuck in in an increasingly horrifying office environment after the death of her human (who might just be the ghost in the machine back in the Beacon, or one of several). Always on board with fax-based horror.
You can feel about Ryan Murphy's expansive work since leaving high school one way or another (I've seen very little of his since Popular), but the acting in the second season of Monster is astonishing. Cooper Koch's tour de force in the fifth episode - an almost single-shot take that recounts the abuse his character suffered at the hands of his parents - is the kind of harrowing experience that transcends television. I would like to read a piece on how Murphy's gone from writing about the hellmouth of high school to the worst real and imagined horrors of the world.
2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023
