Best TV shows of 2024: 'Shōgun,' 'Baby Reindeer,' 'Blue Bloods,'  8 more

As TV inevitably tumbled down that famous hill known as "Peak TV" in 2024, the minor miracle is that there was so much excellence to be had on the way down. Don't forget that 2023 was TV's bust year, with two major Hollywood strikes, a "linear TV" shakeout, and a streaming one, too.

Who knew whether there'd be anything to see on our screens this past year, much less a lot — almost too much. The Peak TV era may have officially ended, but the gifts just kept on coming.

This list, then, is hardly a certified, inscribed-in-stone "Best of 2024," but merely my modest attempt to explain what I liked (and why) in this year of plenty. Your list may be different, and no doubt is. That's the beauty of television, circa 2024, and hopefully into 2025: There's still enough excellence to support many lists.

1. SHOGUN (FX)

Surprised? Not if you were among the few who watched the recent Emmys, which it owned, or read my review ("... a reverent authenticity to what's on screen ... world-building on a grand scale.") Any drawbacks? Nothing particularly serious. As I also noted, this "Shōgun" could be chilly and dark, but how could an epic-scale series about the clash of cultures and violent warlords with a doomed love story at its core be otherwise? But what a series, or event, or landmark. (All three!) "Shōgun" was a wonder, certainly, but wonders become wonderful only by careful attention to the many details that go into the production of something this sweeping and complicated. Those include many standout performances, notably Anna Sawai's portrayal of Toda Mariko — the tragic translator with conflicting loyalties to different cultures and worlds. Veteran Japanese star Hiroyuki Sanada — as Lord Yoshii Toranaga — was superb as well.

2. MASTERS OF THE AIR (Apple TV+)

One of the best series of the year flew almost completely under the radar (couldn't resist the pun; could you?). The Emmys and critics ignored this, and even Apple finally seemed to despair of ever trying to lure subscribers with a World War II epic. What happened? First, the director of the first three episodes, Cary Fukunaga, was subject of a Rolling Stone bombshell investigation about his on-set behavior. The miniseries itself — about the Eighth Army Air Force's 100th Bomb Group's campaign over Germany — was brutal to watch at times, too. But when the companion series "Band of Brothers" came out in 2001, many WW2 veterans were entering their 80s. Those who are still alive now are nearing 100 (or beyond). Many potential younger viewers, in their teens and 20s, may not know much about World War II. Why would they care about this? And so, "Masters" — based on Donald Miller's excellent 2006 history of the 100th — may have simply died out of utter viewer disinterest. A shame indeed.
 

3. RIPLEY (Netflix)

There was no particular reason to assume this latest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 crime thriller would add anything new to the pot — other than Andrew Scott as the "talented" Tom Ripley, who was brilliant. But what truly made this soar far beyond expectations was the black-and-white cinematography. Filmed on location in eye-candy destinations like Venice, Palermo and Atrani, Italy, to watch this was to fall under their spell. That was the true inspiration of showrunner Steven Zaillian's approach — to seduce us, much as Ripley seduced his victims.

4. THE SYMPATHIZER (HBO)

This seven-parter about a double agent for the North Vietnamese during the war in Vietnam — based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen — arrived as a question mark. How would audiences react (for example) to Robert Downey Jr. playing four different characters? Not well, as it turned out, while the Emmys overlooked this entirely. Maybe no one wanted to be reminded of the war. Or maybe director Park Chan-wook's bleak and occasionally farcical interpretation was too unsettling. But what "The Sympathizer" did particularly well was offer a Vietnamese perspective on the injustice and horror of that long-ago "forever war."

5. BABY REINDEER (Netflix)

Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) is a struggling comic who makes ends meet as a bartender in a London pub, when one quiet afternoon, Martha (Jessica Gunning) drifts in. And so begins the breakout of 2024. Like "I May Destroy You" and "Fleabag," two other outstanding Brit imports about trauma and atonement, Gadd found a powerful way to loop something as horrifying as rape into a story about the search for identity — his own. He got a pair of Emmys, but Gunning's own win (supporting) was just as deserved. Her tragic portrait of obsession anchored both "Reindeer" and Gadd's performance. Indeed, here was the most memorable performance of 2024.

6. 3 BODY PROBLEM (Netflix)

For their next project after "Game of Thrones," David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (along with veteran TV producer Alexander Woo) went about as far in the opposite direction as they could — an egg-heady sci-fi concoction with hints of quantum mechanics and calculus. But what made this adaptation of the first novel of Liu Cixin's 2006-10 trilogy, "Remembrance of Earth's Past," so successful was just plain ol' sci-fi showmanship, with a sneakily subversive throughline about global warming, artificial intelligence and other potential civilization-ending events. Best of all, "3 Body" was mostly a fun story told via virtual reality. The fun hopefully continues for a second season.

7. THE AGENCY (Showtime/Paramount+)  and DAY OF THE JACKAL (Peacock)

It's rare that you get one excellent spy TV thriller over a 12-month span, but two almost seems like a mistake. How could the streaming gods have let this happen? But they did, and here they are, both radically different but also highly effective edge-of-your-seat yarns. They're polar opposites in terms of source material but what they do have in common are leading men — Michael Fassbender and Eddie Redmayne, respectively — who know how to hold an audience's attention (and hold it and hold it). Hence, a tie.

8. FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS (FX)

Arriving at the beginning of the year, this "Feud" was as chilly as the outdoors — a "beautifully acted, directed and written bummer," my review promised, or warned. But the cast was so good, the story so compelling that it was easy to overlook that "bummer" part. Best of all was Tom Hollander's Capote. Hollander seemed to capture the precise essence of whatever it was that made Capote so special, so irresistible, to his friends in the first place. He was also grounded in personal tragedy because he didn't betray his friends so much as he betrayed himself.

9. THE FRANCHISE (HBO)

To borrow directly from my review about this takedown of superhero movies by one of my superhero showrunners, Armando Iannucci ("Veep"): ". . . a whiz-bang romp of zingers, one-liners, comebacks, come-ons and every other rhetorical trick you can possibly imagine. Each and all are in service of one largely irrefutable point: Show biz, or at least the corner of it that's increasingly crowded by bloated attention hogs like Marvel, is a joke." A good and funny joke for the most part.

10. BLUE BLOODS (CBS)

You'll notice that everything else on this list is a new series, but here I decided to make an exception because "Blue Bloods" was something of a revelation this final season — a surprisingly nuanced and intelligent one. "Blue Bloods" didn't set out to make noise, or break formulas, while there was nothing particularly shocking (other than the finale) or out of character. Instead, over 18 episodes, this coda sought to reaffirm the faith of the faithful — that what had played out over these past 14 years mattered, and that the essential message had remained the same. As always, that had to do with family — to love and support one another, to see past your differences, however bitter or profound. Family is all you got — that's the unwritten "Blue Bloods" tagline, in big, bold, blue letters. What a reassuring message after the year we all just went through.