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Each week, when I come to review the latest big television shows, I find the task of assigning a star rating the most challenging part of the process. Three stars feels like a cop-out, but the measures on either side – the nuclear two-star, which will prompt defensive accusations from fans, or the glowing four-star recommendation that you will have to stand by – feel so extreme. And most television is worth three stars: either not especially good nor especially bad, or a curate’s egg built of some excellent parts and some rubbish ones.
So, as you can imagine, the task of ranking the year’s television is not something I relish. But here, as 2024 draws to a close, are 20 shows that I can, unreservedly, recommend. Shows that hurdle over the three-star threshold while their contemporaries limbo under it. These are the 20 best shows of the year – with apologies, in advance, for your favourites that didn’t make the list.
20. Nobody Wants This
Adam Brody has forged an excellent career playing nice guys who also happen to be hot. In Nobody Wants This, he played a nice guy who also happens to be a rabbi – giving a new generation of viewers license to think they’ve just discovered that Adam Brody is, also, hot. Co-starring Kristen Bell (and Succession’s Justine Lupe), this very modern tale of interfaith dating was sharp, sexy and contained one of the (slightly) less unrealistic portraits of podcasting committed to TV in recent years.
19. Mr Bates vs the Post Office
I still receive the occasional email – or dirty look at a drinks party – because of my three-star review of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. This isn’t a mea culpa: I still think the drama is rather bland; the writing uninspiring. But I wildly underestimated the impact of the series and the resonance it would have with the general public. The story told by Toby Jones and co moved the needle on a historic injustice, showcasing the enormous power of television, and reinforcing the reality – if it needed reinforcing – that what I think really doesn’t matter at all.
18. Feud: Capote vs the Swans
The second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud – an anthology series looking at Hollywood’s most acrimonious fallouts – focused on the writer Truman Capote (an excellent Tom Hollander) and the society women he satirised in a long Esquire essay. Aided by an all-star cast (Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Calista Flockhart, Demi Moore etc), this is a joyously nasty peer into high society – far more compelling than Apple’s Palm Royale – and a genuine insight into a truly great, but truly flawed, writer. (It’s been a good year for Murphy: the second series of his Monsters anthology, about the Menendez brothers, was a sensation.)
17. Say Nothing
Making an entertainment product out of the Troubles is a tricky business, and one that most broadcasters eschew in favour of sober documentaries. Disney+’s Say Nothing, based on the book by Patrick Radden Keefe, attempts to square that circle, humanising its protagonist, IRA bomber Dolours Price, while asking difficult questions about her involvement in the abduction and assassination of Jean McConville. It is challenging viewing, without easy answers, aided by a fine visual evocation of a dark chapter in British and Irish history.
16. Slow Horses
Reviewing Apple’s Slow Horses is a boring job, because it’s the most consistent show on TV. The fourth season – their fourth since April 2022, that is – was another swaggering tale of corruption and deceit. Gary Oldman looks like he’s still relishing playing Jackson Lamb as a repulsive inebriate, and the cast around him, from Jack Lowden to Kristin Scott Thomas, are growing ever more confident in their roles. Eventually they may produce a bum season, as complacency or inertia kicks in, but series four was not that.
15. Gogglebox/Only Connect
Sometimes it’s important to recognise shows that are always there for you, like a good friend, a warm blanket or correspondence from HMRC. Two shows that fell into this category in 2024: season 23 of Gogglebox and season 20 of Only Connect. Both shows have the quality of feeling entirely familiar – a reassuring and centring presence at the start of the week (Only Connect) and at its end (Gogglebox). If this were the connections round on a quiz show, they would be united in showcasing a selection of Britain’s most loveable oddballs, and somehow making me laugh far more often than most actual comedy shows.
14. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith’s book, The Talented Mr Ripley, is excellent. Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of that book, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, is excellent. And so, there was little need for Netflix to revisit the story, with Andrew Scott in the title role, for Ripley. And yet, the moody chiaroscuro counterbalances Netflix’s propensity for flat visual vigour, turning Ripley into one of their more interesting dramas. It was also my mother-in-law’s show of the year – and who am I to argue with that sort of recommendation?
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13. Julia
The second season of Sky’s Julia – starring Sarah Lancashire as Julia Child – will be its last. Don’t let that fact leave a bad taste in your mouth: it was a delicious treat, showing how Julia’s increased celebrity, and unorthodox lifestyle, brings her under the microscope of the FBI. The combination of Lancashire, David Hyde Pierce (playing her husband), French landscapes, and almost pornographic depictions of omelettes, ensures that Julia, over just 16 episodes, has left a sumptuous impression on TV viewers.
12. Married at First Sight: Australia
I generally try to avoid the low-grade reality TV that my partner inhales, but I found myself accidentally swept up in season 11 of Married at First Sight: Australia. Usually after about five minutes of a dating show, I have to leave the room and make myself a cup of tea (never to return), but, somehow, I found myself watching all 38 episodes of MAFSA. And I’ll tell you: the moment where Jack told Jonathan to “muzzle [his] woman” was the most jaw-dropping thing I saw on the small screen this year.
11. Lady in the Lake
Apple had a hit-and-miss year in the prestige drama stakes, with shows featuring talent like Cate Blanchett, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kristen Wiig falling flat. But Lady in the Lake, a crime thriller starring Natalie Portman as an investigator raking up secrets in 1960s Baltimore, showed the power of a blank chequebook. The period detail and evocation of the social tensions of crime was the closest thing to David Fincher’s Mindhunter that we’ve witnessed since Netflix unduly canned that show. And Portman proved, once again, that the luminosity of some star power can survive the transition to the small screen.
10. The Day of the Jackal
I credit Slow Horses with ending the Le Carréisation of spy dramas. Gone are the dark rooms, the bookish men slowly untangling secrets, the impeccable suits and the secret political affiliations. In its place are shows like The Day of the Jackal – a disarmingly nonsensical yarn that somehow manages to feel entirely plausible. Eddie Redmayne steps into the shoes of Frederick Forsyth’s assassin (or applies his layers of prosthetics) for a pan-European game of cat and mouse with British intelligence. Tense, pulpy and riotously watchable: it’s one of the best thrillers of the year.
9. Rivals
Bringing the bonkbuster back to our screens turned out to be an inspired decision, as Rivals proved a hit for Disney+ this year. Featuring a stellar cast of men your mum fancies (Aidan Turner, David Tennant, Alex Hassell) and cult British TV talent (Katherine Parkinson, Emily Atack, Danny Dyer), Rivals was one of the most frenetic, easily digestible sagas in a long time. It proved that, sometimes, sauciness trumps sophistication. This wasn’t a slow-burning cigarette after sex; it was a manically chugged pint of nightstand water. And yet, somehow, it worked.
8. Industry
I recently spoke to someone who felt that they had slogged through the first two seasons of the BBC’s Industry, but that the pain of that exercise had been justified by the excellent third instalment. This is rather damned with faint (or impractical) praise, but season three of Industry did, indeed, take the show into new areas. Kit Harington’s Henry Muck brought a bit of Hollywood glamour, and the plot became slightly more inviting, the dialogue slightly less arcane, as though the creators were consciously welcoming TV refugees from the end of Succession. And in the quest to be the big, writerly show of the moment, Industry has made a convincing claim.
7. Hacks
I’m cheating with this because although Hacks – a comedy about the unlikely and difficult friendship between an ageing comedy queen and a young writer – did release an acclaimed season of television in 2024, due to a complex rights situation involving HBO, Sky and Prime Video, it hasn’t been broadcast in the UK. At present, there is no sign that it will – but it would be unfair to ignore Hacks just because distributors can’t get their British quackers in a row. Smart, edgy and deeply human, Hacks has a very strong claim to be the best show on television right now (and would be higher on this list if UK viewers could… watch it).
6. Mr Loverman
It’s been a mixed year for terrestrial dramas, but the BBC’s adaptation of the Bernardine Evaristo novel, Mr Loverman, snuck in under the wire. Lennie James plays a closeted gay man entering the autumn of his life. Eight half-hour episodes chronicle the end of his marriage and the start of a new existence, delivering a complex portrait of self-denial, repression, and, ultimately, the expressive power of love. It’s exactly the sort of low-key drama that the BBC should be investing in (and, thankfully, doesn’t feature any detectives with drinking problems).
5. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light
Nearly a decade ago, the first instalment of Wolf Hall gave us a superior insight into life in the Tudor court. This November, it returned with a bang – or a chop – as Anne Boleyn gave way to Jane Seymour, and Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell continued his ascent of Henry VIII’s court. The lushness of the production matches most big-budget period dramas, but Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light adds intellectual and historical curiosity to the mix, with terrific results.
4. We Might Regret This
It was pretty clear from the opening scenes of the BBC’s We Might Regret This that, in the figure of Kyla Harris, they had discovered a new star. The actor/writer’s debut series was a warts-and-all, and deeply funny, look at the myriad dependencies that a tetraplegic woman faces in the course of her romantic and social life. Harris’s co-stars – including Darren Boyd and Elena Saurel – fully commit to proceedings, which alternate between semi-farce and stark poignancy. Sensibly, the BBC has already committed to another two series.
3. Mr & Mrs Smith
The world needed another Mr & Mrs Smith adaptation like it needed another Trump presidency, but somehow this show, written by Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover, and starring Glover and Maya Erskine, managed to be really, really good. The two leads are naturally funny performers, and share a palpable onscreen chemistry, while the episodes are all well-crafted, standalone spy thrillers. The show was smart, sexy and slick; easily the best thing on Prime Video this year.
2. Shōgun
You can’t schedule appointment television, but boy will networks try. After sitting through damp squibs like House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power, I was wary about Disney+’s Shōgun, based on the epic reimagining of feudal Japan by James Clavell. I needn’t have worried: Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’s adaptation was sophisticated and sensitive. It was titillating in some places, but ruminative in others. This exquisite balance of sex, violence, politics and the lavish scope of history combined to make Shōgun one of the most impressive new dramas of 2024.
1. Baby Reindeer
A low-budget Netflix drama based on an Edinburgh Fringe one-man show was not a pitch that inspired much confidence. But pretty quickly it became clear that Baby Reindeer was something quite different from the fare usually served up to TV audiences. Richard Gadd’s semi-autobiographical (I’ll bet he’s now wishing he’d said “entirely fictional”) tale of co-dependency, abuse and ambition became a sensation, topping viewing charts around the world and creating a furore in the tabloid press. All this – and all the moralisation about the ethics of “true crime” – has rather obscured one key point: Baby Reindeer is also a strikingly inventive and compelling piece of television. No show in 2024 has started so many conversations, and no show has gripped so many viewers. A triumph, then, for Gadd, his co-star Jessica Gunning, and the executives at Netflix who took a punt on an improbable phenomenon.
