The Best TV of 2024

A top 10 shows list, plus 'Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,' 'Creature Commandos,' 'Black Doves,' 'The Madness,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as there’s a riverboat gambler for some reason…

Best of the best: 2024 in teevee

We’re in the last month of 2024, which means it’s superlatives time. For me, this starts out with my ranked list of my 10 favorite shows of the year, which you can go read here.

Since people don’t usually read introductions to lists, I’ll repeat the point I made there: this was not the best TV year in recent memory, for a variety of reasons, including residual effects from the strikes, post-Peak TV contraction, and the fact that several all-time classics ended in 2023. But I still loved the shows on this list — and liked a whole lot of things about the shows that will appear on other lists from me this month, covering the year’s best performances, episodes, and various new shows that didn’t make the Top 10. And even if the overall depth of Great Television was down from past years, there are still a few all-time classics on this list, including the relatively unheralded show I put all the way in the top spot: Somebody Somewhere, whose series finale comes this weekend on HBO. Did I give it that ranking in part as a protest vote for it ending when it clearly could keep running for years and years? Maybe a tiny amount. Mostly, though, it’s there because it’s incredible, and deserves to be regarded as such.

Also, I should note that even in a year with less overall content, I simply can’t get to everything. Industry and Interview with the Vampire have gotten a ton of praise this year from some of my peers, but I’m more than a full season behind on each. I just started bingeing all of Arcane for something I might write later this month, and for all I know, by the time I’m done I’ll regret not getting to it in time for this year’s list. And there aren’t Squid Game Season Two screeners yet, so I can’t speak to whether it will deserve a return appearance on the list. But this was the best of what I got to see.

When you wish upon a Star Wars

People often ask if critics go into certain projects with presumptions that they can’t shake once they actually experience the work. We’re only human, and can’t help but having advance thoughts on some things. Those takes sometimes prove true, but often they don’t. I’ve seen plenty of shows I went into with excitement, and came out of with disappointment, and others I was convinced I would hate, only to emerge pleasantly surprised.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, which debuted on Disney+ earlier this week with two episodes, belongs to that latter category. It is wildly transparent and unapologetic nostalgia porn, essentially taking four kids from what looks like suburban American in the Eighties, two of them huge Star Wars fanboys, and sending them on a genuine Star Wars adventure. Conceptually, it’s everything that exhausts me about an entertainment industry that seems to only know how to look back, not forward.

And yet in execution… I liked it? Jon Watts (who co-created it and directed the first episode) and David Lowery (who directed the next two) are good storytellers with a track record for making IP-driven material feel vibrant rather than obligatory. I thought this week’s two episodes and the new one debuting next week were all solidly-crafted pieces of kidventure, especially once the kids leave their home planet and have to deal with pirates and droids and whatnot. It’s not reinventing the franchise, by any means, but I look forward to watching the rest of the season and seeing where it goes.

Creature feature

Elsewhere in franchises, we’ve got the debut of Creature Commandos on Max. This is created by James Gunn, as an animated spinoff of The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, and is also the first project produced by DC Studios since Gunn was given the keys to that particular kingdom. Tonally, it’s both not quite what I expected and exactly what I should have expected: more tragic than comic, as if Gunn were starting out in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 mode, rather than opening with goofiness. I liked it, and spent my review alternating between praise of the seven-episode season and observations on how this is both a strange and appropriate start to the Gunn era at DC.

This is what it sounds like when Black Doves cry?

Because I published the last newsletter the day before Thanksgiving, I didn’t get to link to either of last week’s reviews. In one case, though, it was for a show that debuted this week: Netflix’s Black Doves, a miniseries where Keira Knightley plays a freelance deep cover spy, and Ben Whishaw plays her assassin friend. Between Slow Horses, The Agency, and this, we are now in the midst of Peak London Spy TV. As I discuss in my review, the parts of Black Doves that are just Knightley and Whishaw bantering with each other or with some of the other spies and killers, it’s quite a bit of fun. But when it asks us to take the emotional toll of their jobs seriously, it can be more of a drag. But the good parts outweigh the less thrilling ones, even if the show wastes Warrior alum Andrew Koji, putting him into a show with lots of action and never once letting him throw a kick or punch.

Stop The Madness?

Last week’s other review was for a show that actually debuted last week, and another Netflix miniseries: The Madness, starring Colman Domingo as a CNN pundit who becomes the fall guy in a labyrinthine conspiracy involving white supremacists, shady billionaires, and powerful forces within our own government. Domingo is suitably badass in a more traditional leading man role than he usually gets to play, and the opening chapters do a nice job of escalating the scale of the conspiracy, and the amount of trouble Domingo seems to be in. At a certain point, though, The Madness starts to lose the thread, and the story concludes on a pretty underwhelming note, even with a great villainous turn from Alison “Poor Martha from The Americans” Wright.

Odds and/or ends

• It was a parody of Walter Hill’s Seventies New York street gang epic The Warriors this week on What We Do in the Shadows. Can you dig it?!?! As this week’s newsletter intro line suggests, the breakdancing vampire gang was my favorite, but the whole episode was an absolute delight, all the way through to the show’s latest cameo by another famous pop culture vampire, with Alexander Skarsgård back in his True Blood wardrobe for the concluding joke. We know from Skarsgård’s cameos on other shows like Atlanta that he is game for pretty much anything, but the funniest part of the whole deal may be the statement he put out through FX about the appearance, in which he wrote, “I’m afraid I have no recollection of shooting this episode as Dr. Laszlo Cravensworth apparently hypnotized me at the wrap party. But I did wake up with an intense physical attraction to Dr. Cravensworth and found his extraordinary wit, charm and intelligence absolutely disarming. I have since started a YouTube fan page for him. It’s called ‘Because you’re Cravens-worth it’ Please like, follow and subscribe.”

• Lots to love about this week’s Shrinking, including Paul answering questions from Gaby’s students with the same crabby, don’t-give-a-fuck energy that Harrison Ford brings to movie junkets these days. But what I want to bring up is the clear advantage you get when you not only make a season with 12 episodes, versus 8 or even 10, but have a bunch of broadcast network comedy veterans in the writers room. Too many streaming comedies, even ensemble ones like this, will give each character one primary story to carry them through a whole season. Shrinking does have some season-long arcs, but it has both the room and the discipline to vary things up, so that there are lots of shorter storylines and even episodic one-offs. It’s not hard to imagine a version of the show where Gaby spent the entire season getting out of the bad relationship with Jimmy and dealing with the fallout, for instance. Here, she’s gotten to also deal with her sister, her class, and her relationship with D2, so that by the time this episode revisits the Jimmy thing, it doesn’t feel like the show has dragged it out, or let it overly define Gaby. It’s just one of a lot of things she’s dealing with, and it gives Jessica Williams a much greater range of things to play. More TV should be able to function like this.

• It’s been a long time since I watched Superman & Lois, but I thought this week’s series finale warranted mention, as it’s the official end of the Arrowverse, which ran for a dozen years and nearly 700 episodes across multiple series. Even though there are other comic book and sci-fi franchises out there — two of them discussed higher up in this newsletter, as you might recall — it’s hard to imagine any future ones producing that much volume. The economy of the business has changed so radically since Arrow debuted, including the fact that the CW, which was home to all these shows, barely even exists as a network anymore. When you churn out that much product, some of it will work more than others — my favorites were the first couple of seasons of The Flash, and everything Legends of Tomorrow did after its first season — but the ability to keep making it, year after year, and to occasionally pull off huge events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, is worthy of attention and respect here at the end of it.

• Finally, since the holiday shopping season continues, I understand that I am legally obligated to remind you that Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul remains available for preorder. Your loved ones won’t get it til February 4, but you can put a note to that effect under the Christmas tree or holiday conifer of your choosing.

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?