The 20 best TV shows of 2024 (so far)
Gutting romances! Bloody epics! Cinematic feasts! Here are the series that have most wowed The A.V. Club this year.
TV Lists Lucia Aniello
Clockwise from bottom left: Anjana Vasan in We Are Lady Parts (Photo: Saima Khalid/WWTV/Peacock/Channel 4), Julio Torres in Fantasmas (Photo: Monica Lek/HBO), Sarayu Blue in Expats (Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Prime Video), Jacob Anderson in Interview With The Vampire (Photo: Larry Horricks/AMC), Andrew Scott in Ripley (Photo: Netflix), and X-Men ’97 (Image: Marvel Studios)
The year is almost halfway over, people. Which means that at The A.V. Club, we’re sounding off on the best pop culture 2024 has gifted us to date—and, specifically here, the TV shows that have most impressed, be they bold doses of nostalgia (X-Men ’97), cinematic stunners (Ripley), or sweeping historical epics (Shōgun, the series that, it’s worth noting, received the most points in our staff-wide poll). To be included in this list, a show simply has to have started a new season between January and mid-June (hence the absences of House Of The Dragon and about-to-return AVC favorite The Bear). Here are our 20 favorite series of the year (so far), in alphabetical order.
41 Comments
Damn, I had hoped the new ownership meant the end of slideshows.
But all the fans love them. /sarcasm
Probably gotta wait for a site redesign. Going by Paste’s site, I’m guessing (hoping) slideshows will go away.
The new season of Doctor Who probably deserves to be included though it is a pretty good list & there aren’t shows that are glaringly undeserving to be on it that jump out at me
I’m warming to it, but it has had a few clunkers so far.
Doctor Who is almost always uneven, but the best episodes this season have been somewhat revelatory IMO
Yeah, the shift to shorter and shorter seasons negatively impacts Doctor Who more than almost any other show. When you’ve got 15+ episodes to knock around in there’s plenty of space for episodes that zero in on character, smaller moments, weird episodes, the occasional clunker, episodes that barely feature The Doctor, etc. When you’ve only got 8 episodes it raises the stakes so much on every individual episode that you loose a lot of that organic character development and freedom.
Whoever makes these lists, please watch things from outside the anglosphere, I’m begging you.This is a pop culture website and it’s a big world out there.
“Anglosphere?”
Places in the world that speak English as a first language, and also America.
Jesus fuck, don’t give the Sepps the idea that they’re all of the Anglosphere.
what shows would you add to the 2024 list?
We Are Lady Parts/Tokyo Vice/Shogun/Mr. and Mrs. Smith/Fantasmas too white for you?
Glad to see Evil on this list. Not enough people know about, let alone watch, this amazing and fun show.
I watched the first episode and dug it. But there’s just too much TV.
Evil is the X-Files on LSD and sprinkled with holy water.
It was way too catholic for me. Not sure if that ever lightened up, but it’s not a particularly compelling mythology for me.
If you liked the first episode, you’ll like the rest as it just gets better and better. It’s in it’s final season, so it’s a good binge watch to completion when you get the chance.
Okay, thanks. But there’s just so much TV…..
Andrea Martin needs a spin off. And Evil needs a lot more seasons.
This.
I’m going to stump here for Smiling Friends season 2. It is even more bizarre and hilarious than the previous, awesome season, with just as many eccentric new ideas, characters, and a variety of animated madness that still manages to stay cohesive within its own bizarre world logic. Fans of Adult Swim animation classics should definitely tune in.
Mr and Mrs Smith is not good. Maybe a few episodes are good, but not overall.
Really cannot overstate how good X-Men ‘97 is. The mutant metaphor has never felt more relevant, it’s way more mature than the original show, and it made a really compelling case for “Magneto is right.”I hadn’t watched the other seasons, but I watched fourth season of True Detective and enjoyed it. Turns out, it was exactly the kind of mystery/thriller/horror that I often enjoy these days.
So, was Tokyo Vice season two intended to be on this list, or was it always intended to be an afterthought tucked under the Shogun slide?
Monsieur Spade was an asinine mess, with one of the most ridiculous finale ever shot.True Detective: What a Night Country now has its logo next to the Webster’s dictionary definition of “self-important”.There was actually a third crime miniseries running at the same time, Criminal Record, starring Peter Capaldi and Josh Cumbo. It was way better than these other two. There was nothing earth-shattering, it didn’t pretend to reinvent the wheel, but at least it delivered on all the accounts that mattered.
“Spade” was pretty solid up until that wretched finale, though.
Ridiculously fun, imo. Got my partner interested in watching the Maltese Falcon too, which is a win for me. I adored Sam’s brutal French accent!
Monsieur Spade was a really great series up to its catastrophically horrible finale. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what they were thinking with that one.
Not to mention it was literally a rip off of fucking…
I loved the entire series up until that deus ex Langley, especially with a completely era-inaccurate Sassy Black Woman some…working as a high-ranking CIA agent in fucking 1955. You know. Before Rosa Parks refused to change seats. I think the problem is that they wanted to use the Magic Autistic Kid (he can crack any encryption!) as a MacGuffin, but then didn’t want to deal with the implications of that…so better whisk him off the table and imply that the USA got him. They could’ve made it anything – documents on French atrocities in Algeria, or perhaps evidence of Soviet involvement, rumblings of France withdrawing from NATO, fucking anything – something that’s still earth-shattering for the people we saw in the series, but not something so stupid as as the terrible stereotype of “autistic kids are wizards”.
I know anime is usually far from considered in these lists, but I’ll stump for Delicious in Dungeon. Non-anime viewers might find it easier to get into since it’s based on high fantasy, like D&D (hence the English title) and The Lord of the Rings, and mostly eschews anime-related tropes and motifs. And though the story is, initially, a slow burn, the show is sufficiently hilarious and surprisingly creative to make up for the pacing.
Delicious in Dungeon is the first anime I’ve loved since the early 2000s. It just hits so many sweet spots, and I adore the little things it does to make a career as a dungeon delving adventurer seem plausible.
Yeah, Ryoko Kui, the author and illustrator of the manga, truly put a lot of thought and care into how the world works, including the multitude of monster-filled meals (which I forgot to mention earlier serves as part of the plot).
Is Michael Emerson playing a bad guy in “Evil”? I liked him so much in “Person of Interest” that I sort of don’t want to see beim being evil again like in “Lost”.
he is the bad guy but he somehow dials it up more than in Lost, so his character is often pretty funny/ridiculously evil. he’s genuinely great if you want to give it a shot!!
We Are Lady Parts is probably my favourite new (to me) show since Derry Girls.
Mrs F77 and I hated One Day (unlike most people we know). He was thoroughly obnoxious for 95% of the run time, and she was obnoxious for maybe 60% of it. It didn’t help for me that I shared a house while at University with a good-looking , financially-privileged, lazy student with a creepy Oedipal relationship with his glamorous mother.
Sorry, but this season of True Detective rapidly went downhill after the first episode.
3 Body Problem was good enough for this.Night Country was definitely not, despite the comment sections being far more thorough in their criticism about what was actually presented on screen than the reviews.
Jesus your daily show sypsis reads like it was written by paramount publicity. “Stewart shares the desk with …, who bring their unique sensibilities to their respective nights, keeping the series from feeling stale.“ No, they’re still painfully untalented as they have been for a decade. The ds is a one night a week affair and will stuble along until stewart either comes back full time or they hire a host from full time who clears the deck
So I recently went back and watched all 5 seasons of X-Men (not ‘97) before I watched this new series. The show is basically how I remember it, 20 minute commercial buffers with bright colors, Wolverine callin people Bub and ridiculously simplistic character logic fit for a 5 year old viewer.I’m not all the way through 97 yet, but good God is it taking the original show to another level. It’s not just the animation that’s progressed, the characters still very much embody their original forms, but are sensible and complex, as opposed to “look here’s a bad guy, hit him”. Still hate all the outer space, Shi’ar bullshit.