TV was pretty good in 2024
A look back at shows you saw or should see or should avoid


Chicago sports pretty much sucked in every possible way in 2024, but you know what was good?
TV.
No, not Marquee Sports Network, real TV, where thought is actually given to the end product. Most people don’t have the will or the time to watch as much TV as I do, so as a helpful service to you, I’m going to give you a quick rundown of things you probably watched, things you haven’t had a chance to see yet, things you assume suck (you might be right) and things you might not even know about.
Shōgun, FX - This 10-episode mini-series is far less a remake of the 1980 Richard Chamberlain mini-series than it is a kick-ass adaptation of James Clavell’s book, told from the perspective of the Japanese characters far more than the “white savior.” It’s an awesome show that takes a complicated book and turns it into something easy to follow, even if you have to (gasp) read subtitles for much of it. It’s so well done that you’ll get over it. There were a lot of really good TV shows in 2024, but Shōgun was by far the best one.
Girls5Eva, Netflix - The first two seasons of this show aired on Peacock, and when Netflix saved it from cancellation it seemed like we’d get several more, but they canceled it again after its third season. Never mind that. Just enjoy the three that exist. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it has the same joke every five seconds style of 30 Rock or The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It’s more Kimmy than 30 Rock, but I really enjoyed it. The basic premise is that a flash in the pan all girls group makes an ill-advised comeback. One of their original members is dead, so Girls5Eva only has four members, and they’re too old to still be singing their tunes from their 20s, but the songs are really funny and surprisingly catchy (and written by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond) and the cast is incredible. Sarah Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Busy Phillips and Paula Pell (even the dead member who appears in flashbacks is somebody, it’s Joy Ride’s Ashley Park.) The whole show would be worth it if only for the Derek Jeter joke Bareilles tells in season one alone. But there’s a lot more.
Dune Prophecy, Max - I never had any desire to read any of the Dune books because I had always heard how long and complicated they were, but during the pandemic I read the first one, and didn’t find any of that to be true. I also read Dune Messiah and found that to be a little nuts, so I quit there. But I love both of the Denis Villeneuve movies, especially when (spoiler alert) Paul Atriedes turns into the bad guy near the end of the second movie—just like he does in the novel. The show on Max focuses on the mysterious Bene Gesserit, the weird religious political entity made up of scheming women and is set 10,000 years before the movies. Ten thousand? Whatever. Anyway, the show looks great, the acting is great (except for Travis Fimmel, whose acting as Desmond Hart appears to just be staring directly at the camera with weird yellow contact lenses.) The plot is complicated but I like that they don’t dumb it down. If you’re only kind of interested in this you aren’t going to like it anyway. They did a great job of casting the younger versions of the characters Emily Watson and Olivia Williams play in the “present.” And Olivia Williams is still smokin’ well into her 50s.
Bad Monkey, Apple TV+ - I wrote a whole column about how good this show is and how it’s the best use of Vince Vaughn in a very long time, and I stand by it even more now that I’ve seen the whole first season. It’s a very funny show, and even though season one burned through the entire Carl Hiaasen book of the same name, it’s coming back for season two, and the creator Bill Lawrence says in his mind there are three seasons to be had. I’ll watch all of it.
Shrinking, Apple TV+ - Speaking of Lawrence, he has another show on Apple, and this one is better known because Harrison Ford is in it. But it’s not Harrison Ford’s show. Maybe it’s Jason Segel’s show? Maybe it’s Jessica Williams’? Maybe it’s Christa Miller’s? It’s probably not Ted McGinley’s, but he’s great in it. The basic idea behind it is that Segel, Ford and Williams are all therapists in a practice that Ford’s character owns, and when the series starts Segel’s character, Jimmy, is still spiraling after the death of his wife who was killed by a drunk driver. Jimmy’s effort to get out of his spiral is to become way too involved with his patients. This doesn’t sound like a funny show, but it is. And even with all of the deep, dark stuff, it’s somehow also a very light, hangout show like Lawrence’s other, more famous ones Scrubs and Cougar Town. It is fun to watch Ford be funny, but it works because he can pivot from that to being a believable hardass, because he’s Harrison Ford. And he has a scene in the season two finale that is probably the best acting he’s ever done. Yes, even better than this:
Bad Sisters, Apple TV+ - Let’s just stay on this Apple TV+ run for a while. Bad Sisters is the Sharon Horgan series about the five Garvey sisters (which include one of my all-time favorite actresses, Sarah Green1 as the one-eyed sister Bibi). Four of them plot to kill the abusive, asshole husband of one of the others. When season one wrapped up there didn’t seem to be any reason to do a season two, but Apple threw a bunch of money at Horgan and she brought everybody back, added Fiona Shaw to the cast and it turned out to be absolutely worth it.
If you don’t know who Fiona Shaw is, she’s been in lots of great stuff. But my favorite thing was her death speech in Andor. Especially the part where her remains have been made into a brick and that dude is just whacking stormtroopers with it.
Silo, Apple TV+- I went into this knowing almost nothing about it other than the story involved 10,000 people living together in a 144 story underground silo (hence the name of the series) because the surface of the Earth was uninhabitable. And, that Rebecca Ferguson was in it. It’s based on a series of books by Hugh Howey and produced by Graham Yost (Justified). Season two wraps up this week, and Apple has already renewed it for seasons three and four so they will get to tell the entire story. It’s really good. Just don’t get too attached to some of the famous actors who start season one.
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+- Alan Sepinwall didn’t like this Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg series about an American bombing squadron in England during the height of World War II and I usually agree with Alan. But not on this. I really liked it. It stars Austin Butler as Elvis…wait, no, as Major Gale “Buck” Cleven and Callum Turner as Major John “Bucky” Egan. And, you would think the writers could have made their nicknames far more different because it gets confusing. But the problem is that these are real guys and this stuff really happened and this is based on a real book, so they were kind of stuck with the confusing names. Some pretty amazing shit happens to these guys, and flying in those bombers had to be terrifying (it’s scary enough from your couch).
Slow Horses, Apple TV+ - We can end the Apple TV portion of this column with its best show. There are tons of London-based spy shows on TV right now and several of them are good, but only one is Slow Horses. Every season is taken from one of the series of books by Mick Herron. You don’t need me to summarize the basic plot. All you need to know is Gary Oldman plays the unwashed, alcoholic, flatulent head of Slough House2, a team of MI5 agents who have all fucked up royally at some point and are sent there to rot away their careers. And they are all truly fuck ups, who in spite of it all tend to end up in the midst of major conspiracies and conflicts and end up being incredibly useful, even though they can never shake the stigma. The show is funny, tense, well plotted, well written, well acted and has some of the best action sequences you’ll ever see. The cast even beyond Oldman is incredible with the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce and a very menacing Hugo Weaving showing up for season four.
All Creatures Great and Small, PBS Masterpiece Theater - I go on about this show ad nauseam, but I can’t help it. This perky little show about a real-life veterinarian working in the idyllic Yorkshire Dales in England is just so fucking good. There are loads of books written by James Herriot, the pen name of the vet (James Wight) and there was already a version of this show the aired on the BBC for 13 seasons3 back in the late ‘70s and all through the ‘80s. So why did they remake it? I have no idea. Other than I’m glad they did. Every season airs in the fall in England and culminates with the Christmas episode, and then airs on PBS starting in January so we can see it. Honestly, it’s probably the only thing I’m actually looking forward to in 2025.
What We Do in the Shadows, FX/Hulu - One of the funniest shows, ever. It’s the story of Jackie Daytona, a real human bartender and high school girls’ volleyball coach. Wait, no, that’s Laszlo Cravensworth wearing jeans and with a toothpick in his mouth. It makes him unrecognizable. Apparently. For six seasons this show about vampires living together in Staten Island somehow kept getting better and funnier. They went out on top as season six is just one banger after another. The entire cast is great, but two stand out. Matt Berry as Laszlo:
And Mark Proksch as Colin Robinson, an energy vampire:
It’s impossible to pick a favorite episode, but mine is the season three one where Colin drives Laszlo’s car.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Prime Video - This is not a remake of the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie movie that Jennifer Aniston must just love. But it is inspired by the plot of that movie. In this one, Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are spys paired together to pose as a married couple under the alias John and Jane Smith. They get their orders via text message from a boss they’ve never met. It’s really good. Here’s a little bonus. Glover’s mom in the show is played by his real-life mom, who had never acted before.
Skeleton Crew, Disney+ - By now you’ve heard 1,000 times that it’s The Goonies meets Star Wars. Well, it actually is. And it’s really fun. The four lead kids (well, three real kids and whoever plays the pachyderm-like kid Neel) are really good. There are pirates, and maybe a Jedi, and a treasure hunt, and people dying so it’s not all fun and games for the kids. They got the tone right and it’s cool to see what suburban Star Wars looks like.
Sherwood, Britbox - You have to pay extra on Amazon Prime for Britbox, but if you time it just right you can sign up, watch both seasons of Sherwood and cancel before your trial runs out. I knew nothing about this how other than James, Boyd and Kay from the Pilot TV podcast loved it, and that it starred David Morrissey and Lesley Manville. It’s based on a real series of murders in Nottinghamshire (and the real Sherwood Forest) in 2004. I knew very little about it when I started watching it, and I was floored by the story and how good the show is. So I won’t tell you anything more about it. Season two deals with a completely different series of (real) crimes but with much of the original cast and it’s also terrific. The season two cast includes Bethany Asher who has Down Syndrome and they give her a lot to do and she plays a vital role in the plot. She’s really, really good. Oh, and Stephen Dillane who played Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones is in season two. See how long it takes you to figure out which one he is.
Fallout, Prime Video - I haven’t played the Fallout games and honestly, the only reason I started watching the show is because Walton Goggins is in it and I wanted to see what Baby Billy Freeman would look like at 200 years old after a nuclear war. The first episode of this show is a classic and sucks you in for the duration. I’m sure the gamer nerds have a million nitpicks about the show, but I really liked it, especially Ella Purnell. And hey, Erik Estrada shows up for an episode! Oh and Michael Rapaport gets his ass kicked, which is always fun to see.
Colin From Accounts, Paramount+ - Like Bad Monkey, I wrote an entire column about his show which is the story of a man, a woman and the dog the man ran over because the woman flashed him one of her boobs. At the time I hadn’t seen season two. It did not disappoint.
True Detective: Night Country, Max - The True Detective series is pretty overrated. The first season with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson was great for about five episodes and then fell apart and the subsequent seasons were either bad (the Colin Farrell/Vince Vaughn one) or uneven (the Stephen Dorff/Mahershala Ali one). This latest one, which no longer has the original creator Nic Pizzolatto, is the only one that holds together the entire way. Jodie Foster, you’ll be shocked to know, is a really good actress, the mystery is compelling, the Alaskan setting is eerie and well put to use. I liked it.
Curb Your Enthusiasm, Max - The secret to Curb is that Larry David tries stuff and so some episodes are absolute classics and some are actually kind of bad. Every season features a few that are so smart and so funny that they cover for the others. But even though Larry is a complete misanthrope he and the nuts he hangs out with are enjoyable even in the “bad” episodes. I rewatched them all before the final season this year and it’s great, but what I realized was in the big “theme” seasons, just how few episodes are actually devoted to that theme. The season where Larry gets cast in The Producers has far less Producers stuff in it than you remember, the season with the Seinfeld reunion has far less Seinfeld in it, and it’s fine. Because the episodes that do deal with the theme make it all worth it. Larry’s biggest accomplishment is actually making Jeff Garlin funny, because nobody else has ever done it. The real MVP of the show, especially the first several years is Richard Lewis. Every scene with Larry and Richard is great. The final season is probably even more uneven than the ones before it, but just like those seasons, the “bad” ones are far from bad and the good ones are great.
Ghosts, Paramount+ - This is the only network show I actually still watch. It’s a ludicrous comedy about a group of ghosts who have died over the years on property that is now a bed and breakfast. An electrical accident kills the wife of the couple who own the mansion and are turning it into the B&B but she only dies for a second. The result is that when she comes to she can see and hear the ghosts who live on the property. I just enjoy the show. A bonus is that on Paramount+ you can also see the first four seasons of the UK version of the show, and it is even better.
A Man On The Inside, Netflix - I know a few people who bailed on this show, where Ted Danson is hired by a private investigator to pose as a nursing home resident to try to solve a mystery of stolen jewelry, because the pilot wasn’t funny. They’re not wrong. But they also missed the point, completely. A Man On The Inside is a half hour but it’s not a sitcom, even though it stars one of the greatest sitcom actors of all time. It’s a very well told story about aging and loss and family, and it does it with a very light touch that never gets too heavy, but finds a way to hit you in the gut when it needs to. It’s not all that funny.4 But that doesn’t mean it’s not great.
The Diplomat, Netflix - I put watching this show off for two years. I love Keri Russell, I was intrigued that it was written and created by Deborah Cahn who wrote for The West Wing, but I just never got around to it. And then, I finally decided to watch it and surprise, it’s really good. The MVPs of the show are Rufus Sewell as the other Ambassador Wyler and Ali Ahn as Eidra, the CIA agent attached to the British embassy. It’s just the right mix of cool locations, great dialogue and ludicrous situations. Actually, I take it back. The real MVP is Rory Kinnear as the smarmy prime minister, especially when he tries to kill that old lady.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Prime Video - It’s the most expensive TV show ever made (even more expensive than season two of Andor) and it looks like it. It’s just an amazing looking show. Based on selected appendixes of The Lord of the Rings (because they don’t own the rights to a bunch of it) you would think this would either drown in Tolkien nerdery or spend too much time overly explaining things to the audience of people who have never read any of it (like me.5) But they don’t. They just trust that you’ll figure it out. And you know what? You do. If it doesn’t all work, most of it does. They killed off one of their best characters at the end of season one, and they recast another big role for season two and after a few minutes of the season two premiere it didn’t matter. Morfydd Clark is outstanding as a “young” Galadriel, Charles Edwards only got the role of Celebrimbor because he was already in New Zealand when they needed to cast it and he’s amazing. Other actors like Charlie Vickers and Daniel Weyman may or may not be playing famous characters from the trilogy. And then there’s Elanor and Poppy who are playing Harfoots, who are definitely not Hobbits (but they definitely are) and they’re just the best. There’s one scene where one of them just shows up out of nowhere and immediately makes you 1000% happier about one of the subplots. Oh, and Rory Kinnear is in this, too, and he sings! The creators handed Amazon a six season map to tell the story. The show has not officially been renewed for season three, but they are apparently getting ready to shoot, so it appears to be happening.
House of the Dragon, Max - My expectations for this show were low, and I thought season one was really uneven. The time jump didn’t help things, even though the younger and older versions of Rhaenyra and Alicent are both very good. Matt Smith seemed to be in a different show than everybody else. I have a hard time taking Rhys Ifans seriously in anything thanks to The Replacements and Notting Hill, and we spent the entire season watching Paddy Considine’s face fall off.
But by the end of season one I was a convert and I thought season two was really good. Now, if only they would give Olivia Cooke a character to play worthy of her actual talent. Oh, and they don’t skimp on the dragons. We get a shitload of dragon action. There’s one battle in season two where a dragon shows up unexpectedly during a battle and melts the shit out of everybody.
The Old Man, FX/Hulu - You cast Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman and Maeby Fünke…I mean Alia Shawkat in something and I’ll be interested. The first season was a slow unrolling mystery about Bridges and Lithgow’s pasts and how Shawkat fit into it. The only frustrating part was that Bridges and Lithgow were almost never in scenes together. Season two changed that completely and put them together almost the entire time. Season two wasn’t quite as good as season one and ended on a cliffhanger and then FX cancelled it. Is it worth starting now if you haven’t already? Honestly? Probably not.
Based On A True Story, Peacock - Jason Bateman produces this and Tom Bateman is one of the stars and it turns out that they are not related at all, but Tom is married to Daisy Ridley, so there’s that. Also, I give Kaley Cuoco a lot of credit. She is generationally wealthy thanks to The Big Bang Theory and she picks really interesting things to be in now even if they don’t pay shit. In this she plays a true crime podcast enthusiast who figures out who a locally famous serial killer is and she and her tennis pro husband (Chris Messina) figure out a way to make it work to their advantage. Season two seemed unnecessary but turned out to be pretty good.
Extraordinary, Hulu - This is a fun show about a world where everyone develops a superpower by their 18th birthday, but Jen is in her early 20s and still doesn’t have one. Some of the powers are cool, like being able to fly or super strength or invisibility, but some are mundane, like being able to go back in time but only three minutes at a time. Jen’s best friend can have the dead communicate through her, so she ends up getting a job with an estate lawyer where the dead talk through her and end up having to explain why they fucked somebody out of their will. One of her friends can make anyone orgasm by just touching them, but he also can’t not make anyone orgasm by touching them, so the power turns out to be less fun than he expected.
The Dog House UK, Max - I love this show. The concept couldn’t be simpler. They installed cameras at Woodgreen, a large dog rescue in the UK and on every show three different groups of people come in looking to adopt a dog. You meet the dogs and get their often tragic backstories and you meet the people and find out that most of them are looking to add a dog to their family to fill a very real void. The dogs are cute, the people are engaging, and the staff do their best to match the perfect dog to the imperfect people. At the end of every episode they follow up to see how it worked out, or even if it worked out at all. It’s all very charming and life affirming.
Pop Culture Jeopardy, Prime Video - It is what it says it is, it’s Jeopardy but the questions are all pop culture related. That means I do very well. But it’s also teams for the first time ever with nine contestants in three teams of three. But it just works and it’s still Jeopardy. The real surprise? Colin Jost is the host and he’s really good at it. Like good enough that he probably should just be the Jeopardy host for all of the Jeopardys. I didn’t expect to like him, much less think how good he’d be hosting the real one. Who knew?
Landman, Paramount+ - Billy Bob Thornton and Demi Moore and Jon Hamm! This sounds great. But I have no idea, because I haven’t watched a minute of it. It’s another Taylor Sheridan show which means the plots will be ludicrous, there will be some really entertaining dialogue at times and really awful dialogue most of the time and at some point some guy is going to beat a woman up and it’s going to go on and on and on and on. The best Taylor Sheridan show was 1883 and of course we had to put up with a woman getting the shit beaten out of her for…reasons? 1923 was OK, but same thing. This time it was a Native American girl and she got beaten repeatedly for the length of the first season. I mean, fuck this guy.
Nobody Wants This, Netflix - It’s fine. How can you not like Kristen Bell and Adam Brody? Plus the supporting cast has Timothy Simons (Jonah from Veep) and Justine Lupe (Willa from Succession). But I don’t get why people liked this so much. The podcast that the sisters host seems awful, though I did like that Brody’s men’s rec league basketball team was named the Matzo Ballers.
The Bear, Hulu - Season three wasn’t as good as seasons one or two, but it was still good and the music still rips.
Presumed Innocent, Apple TV+ - Jake Gyllenhaal takes the Harrison Ford role from the movie in this reworked version of the Scott Turow book. Peter Sarsgaard plays a creepy prosecutor and the always great Bill Camp gets the Brian Dennehy role from the movie. The most confounding part of the show isn’t the weird twist at the end, it’s trying to figure out what accent OT Fagenbele is trying to do. What the hell, man?
Sunny, Apple TV+ - The show has a very interesting premise. Rashida Jones plays a recently widowed woman living in Japan. Her husband and son have been killed in a plane crash and he has left her a robot personal assistant, Sunny, from the company he works for, and hijinks ensue. I love Rashida Jones and she’s good in this, but there’s not enough story for ten episodes. It would have made a good two hour movie. As a series, you spend episodes three through ten hoping they’d just get to the end of the fucking thing already. Well, with the possible exception of the crazy Japanese game show episode nine, That was worth the wait.
3 Body Problem, Netflix - The book this is based on was apparently very popular and this is the show that David Benioff and DB Weiss tackled first after Game of Thrones. The result is…pretty good?
Manhunt, Apple TV+ - This is the story of the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The first episode shows the plot and the murder and I didn’t see any reason to watch any more after that.
Disclaimer, Apple TV+ - It was a good year for Apple TV, and this show has Cate Blanchett starring as a documentary filmmaker whose life unravels after details start to emerge about a much younger man she allegedly had an affair with years before and who subsequently drowned with her making no effort to save him. Kevin Kline plays the father of the boy, Lesley Manville plays the mother and Sacha Baron Cohen plays it straight as Blanchett’s husband. I had a real problem with the ending of this, because I couldn’t understand how we we could just believe the story of the person explaining the twist.
Ripley, Netflix - Andrew Scott plays an older version of the Tom Ripley character played by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. I watched the first episode and thought it was good and the choice to film it all in black and white turned out to give it suitably cool, ominous look. And then I never got back to it.
Besides, how can it ever top Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s incredible line reading of this?
The Franchise, Max - Finally, a movie about Mark Prior! Oh, wait, that’s not what this is. What it is, is a satire about the ridiculous way that superhero movies are made, created by Veep’s Armando Iannucci. The cast is really good and the ridiculous situations they face are ones that famously have actually happened to crews trying to film MCU and DCU movies. But the show isn’t funny. At all. It’s mostly a slog. The finale has one great scene where they film a bridge explosion, but mostly, this show is bad.
The Perfect Couple, Netflix - I didn’t have any interest in watching this rich-people-hide-a-murder series even if I like Liev Schriber and Nicole Kidman and Meghann Fahy, and Eve Hewson (from Bad Sisters), but I decided to watch the first episode, and damnit, I ended up watching the whole thing. And, it was pretty good! Also I figured out who the murderer was with about three episodes to go so I had to keep watching to be proven right. Oh, one thing, if you watch it, get ready to hit Skip Credits after you watch that weird dance number the first time.
Bodkin, Netflix - When I was making this list I knew I’d seen Bodkin but I couldn’t remember what it was. Turns out it was a show I actually kind of liked. Will Forte normally gets on my nerves, but in this, he’s supposed to. He plays a podcaster who travels to an Irish village (Bodkin) to do a cold case podcast on the disappearance of three people years earlier. The real star of the show is Siobhan Cullen who plays Dove, a hilariously foul mouthed journalist investigating the same thing. Did I like it because I’m Irish and I enjoyed all the Irish people endlessly giving Forte’s character shit? Probably.
Black Doves, Netflix - The last show I finished this year was this one, a Keira Knightley spy show where her partner is the voice of Paddington (Ben Whishaw). It’s only six episodes, so it was an easy lift and it’s good with a twisty plot and well done action. The best part of it are the other Black Doves, Williams and Eleanor. They are doing a second season, and I think they it should just be about those two.
And even with the sheer tonnage of the stuff I watched I still need to watch a lot more episodes of Pachinko (Anna Sawai is in it and what I have seen is really good), I haven’t gotten to the Northern Ireland Troubles series Say Nothing, I didn’t watch a lick of The Penguin, and I want to see Interior Chinatown.
So there you go. If you can’t find something to watch now, you can’t blame me.
Sarah is beautiful, which made the running joke in another of her shows, Frank Of Ireland, where the various Gleeson boys she co-starred with (Brandon, Domnhall and Brian) making fun of how homely she was all the funnier. Brian is in season one of Bad Sisters as one of the owners of an insurance agency who can’t afford to pay out the life insurance on the guy who gets murdered. ↩
Wernham Hogg, the paper company in the original The Office is also in Slough. I keep waiting for David Brent to drop in to see Jackson Lamb. ↩
I watched a couple of the old ones and their version of Herriot killed a cow and a dog within the first two episodes. Didn’t they know he was supposed to be good at his job? ↩
If you want funny old people, watch Thelma with June Squibb. Holy shit is that a great and very funny movie. ↩
I read The Hobbit as a kid and was excited to read the trilogy but I could never get into it. I just couldn’t (and still can’t) read 12 pages of Tolkien describing a fucking tree. ↩