To paraphrase Dante from Clerks: eighty-seven?? That figure represents the number of TV series I watched in full in 2024, and I suspect you’ll find it appalling regardless of your viewing habits. If you’re a normal person with a family and a social life and a passing interest in sunlight, you’ll surely deem it disturbingly high (especially when paired with the 237 movies I watched during the same calendar year). But if you’re a true media-consumption addict, your disgust might take on a more contemptuous tone: Eighty-seven, that’s it? What’s the matter, Beck, you trying to get actual sleep these days?
It’s true that, in pure quantitative terms, this is my lowest tally since 2015. As for quality, I can promise you that of the 90-odd TV shows, I can strongly recommend at least 12 of them.
I’m not trying to be glib, nor am I deeply disheartened. Most television series these days remain thoroughly watchable: professional, competent, fine. They just rarely inspire the kind of feverish, “can’t wait to talk about them at the water cooler tomorrow” kind of passion which hooked me on TV in the first place. Some of that is surely due to the binge model; it’s a lot harder to collectively geek out over a single episode when different people are watching whole seasons at different speeds. I’m not ready to say that Netflix ruined television—not when the streaming giant earned four spots in my top 20—but it certainly changed how we watch it and talk about it.
Beyond that, I suspect that I’m to blame as much as the art, because my relationship with TV has (d)evolved into a form of placid passivity. Everyone so often a program gets me fired up, but for the most part I watch a show, I enjoy it in the moment, and then I forget about it. I don’t pretend to attribute this quasi-malaise to a newfound philosophy so much as a rapidly degrading memory; there’s only so much space available in my brain, and the more crowded it grows with average entertainment, the less room there is for something exceptional to stand out. (In case it wasn’t clear, I skipped neuroscience in college.)
Or maybe television really is just collectively following the prophesy of Lester Bangs and meeting in the middle, merging onto a single pathway where the bad shows aren’t as bad and the good shows aren’t as good. Every year I caution that this list isn’t a bell curve, but it’s looking more and more like a flat line. If so, that’s kind of a bummer, but it doesn’t make the medium less meaningful, just less volatile. We go to the movies for magic; we watch TV for comfort.
And the small screen in 2024 supplied plenty of that. There may have only been one true masterpiece, but there were plenty of pleasant, diverting programs that helped fill the hours and distract us from the real world—a valuable function that, if recent events continue, would seem all the more crucial to sustaining our sanity. I may not love many of the series on the ensuing list, but I kinda like most of them, and that level of acceptable entertainment shouldn’t be taken for granted.
On to the rankings. You know the rules: For every show that appears here, I watched the entirety of the current season, plus all prior ones, because my completism forbids me from operating any other way. Also, bear in mind this entire project is axiomatically ridiculous; it’s absurd to rank an entire year’s worth of TV individually, and if you forced me to move any given show up or down 10 spots, I’d barely notice. Finally, while 87—check that, turns out it was 88, this is what happens when you fire your editor—is still a fairly large number, it constitutes a paltry fraction of all scripted series that aired in 2024; remember that if I didn’t watch your precious favorite show, it wasn’t because I lacked time and needed to make difficult choices—it was because I wanted to offend you personally.
And so, here lie the rankings of every TV show I watched in 2024, beginning with the worst and concluding with the top 10 on Friday:
88. Lady in the Lake (Apple, Season 1). I suspect this show would have exploded 15 years ago, back when “prestige TV” was a nascent phrase and landing an Oscar winner to headline your limited series felt like a coup. But these days, I’m not automatically satisfied by seeing Natalie Portman as a small-screen heroine; I need the show to actually be, like, good. And despite gesturing toward some weighty themes— police misconduct; entrenched racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism; journalistic, er, curiosity—Lady in the Lake is pretty bad, with overheated acting, a hopelessly convoluted plot, and thinly written characters. One subplot involves Portman’s character getting a job as a Baltimore reporter through a combination of alleged talent and sheer force of will. Good for her I guess, but this show needed some serious copy editing.
87. Eric (Netflix, Season 1). Hmm, a period piece set in a grimy American city starring a multi-time Oscar nominee (and Marvel superhero) with a plot about a missing kid that also touches on institutional malfeasance… sound familiar? Unlike Lady in the Lake, Eric is perversely entertaining, thanks mostly to its demented premise: Benedict Cumberbatch plays a Jim Henson-like Bad Dad whose substance-abuse issues cause him to imagine one of his giant puppets coming to life and guiding him in the search for his kidnapped son. That sounds cool, but Eric is way too overstretched to breathe any real life into its six hurried episodes, trying to tackle a million concepts—parenting, homelessness, political corruption, homophobia, getting lost on the subway—yet investing none of them with any persuasive detail. Sometimes puppets are cuter when they keep their mouths shut.
86. Snowpiercer (AMC, Season 4; 2022 rank: 102 of 110). Honestly, it was worth a try. TNT cancelling Snowpiercer after three seasons was hardly an injustice (the series was never very good), but the showrunners, whoever the hell they turned out to be in the end, deserved their shot to wrap things up properly. Alas, this final batch of episodes suffers from the same flaws as its predecessors: dubious world-building, feeble writing, and cheap-looking set pieces. Daveed Diggs is fine, and it’s nice to see Jennifer Connelly again, but both of them are too talented to be wasting their time in such a pointless brand extension of an awesome decade-old movie. Now that they’ve dealt with the end of civilization, it’s time for them to come back to the real world.
85. Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (FX, Season 2; 2017 rank: 33 of 108). I’m unclear to what extent this miniseries, about Truman Capote’s toxic relationship with New York socialites, connects with the 2017 series about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford that bore the same moniker. (Ryan Murphy no longer appears to be credited, but you can never doubt the breadth of his ghastly empire.) Yet the titular association set me up for disappointment, because this thing is a slog. Tom Hollander is engaging enough as Capote to avoid constant mental comparisons with Philip Seymour Hoffman (and Toby Jones!), but despite the gifted cast (Naomi Watts! Chloe Sevigny! That old lady from The Substance!), the show is relentlessly unpleasant, without sufficient smarts or glamour to compensate. It’s the kind of feud where nobody wins, including us.
84. The Umbrella Academy (Netflix, Season 4; 2022 rank: 87). This is definitely a TV show that aired in the year 2024.
83. The Tourist (Netflix, Season 2; 2022 rank: 54). The first season of The Tourist, a Jason Bourne-like thriller about an Irishman (Jamie Dornan) who loses his memory and tries to figure out why he’s being hunted by the mob in Australia, mostly worked because it was so spiky and self-contained; it hinted at a broader mythology but largely stayed focused on the ground. So the mere existence of a follow-up is something of a betrayal, even if Dornan and Danielle Macdonald still evince a sweet chemistry. It doesn’t help that the new story, which returns to Ireland and attempts to (literally) dive into our hero’s past, is a tediously familiar tale of gangland violence and clannish grudges. (Guess what, there’s a parental reveal too.) I don’t pretend that The Tourist could have worked as a pure romantic comedy following the leads as they travelled to a different country, but why ensnare them in such a formulaic story? Some memories are best forgotten.
82. Invincible (Amazon, Season 2.5; last year: 64 of 94). There may have been a time when a comic-book series featuring flawed superheroes and excessive violence might have felt transgressive, but I’m over it. The central story of Invincible, involving an omnipotent man-alien hybrid (Steven Yeun) trying to split his time between saving the world and going to college, just feels like warmed-over Spider-Man. Worse, the show doesn’t seem to realize that its animated action carries no weight, resulting in far too many long scenes of pointless cartoon mayhem. There may be some intriguing ideas at work here about work-life balance and inherited sin, but they’re drowned out by the relentless faux exoticism. Being invincible shouldn’t feel so inhuman.
81. La Máquina (Hulu, Season 1). I’ve always been a moderate dissenter on Y Tu Mamá También (if you want to see an Alfonso Cuarón masterpiece, might I recommend Gravity?), but it’s still undeniably satisfying to see Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna share the screen again. (They’ve actually done so a number of times, but not in anything I’ve seen.) Luna in particular is quite good here as a perpetually stressed boxing promoter who keeps injecting chemicals into his lips, with grotesque results. But despite the stars’ obvious affection and the appeal of Eiza González, La Máquina is too stilted and lumbering to work as a piece of coherent storytelling. Rather than luxuriating in the warmth of its actors, it labors to build a vast conspiracy tale, complete with a tragic backstory and some bizarre ESPN product placement. The result is a series that fails to properly calibrate its own reach, like a fighter who unleashes a huge hook and then falls flat on his face.
80. A Man in Full (Netflix, Season 1). I wasn’t bored. Based on a Tom Wolfe novel, this David E. Kelley series is clumsy, silly, and batshit crazy. But it’s bizarrely entertaining, with Jeff Daniels combining the casual superiority of his Newsroom anchor with the cold brutality of his Godless villain. Nothing about A Man in Full is remotely credible—not its cloak-and-dagger electoral politics, not its courtroom hijinks, and definitely not its human relationships. But there’s also a scene of women gasping in horror as they’re forced to watch two horses fuck, and I mean, you just don’t see stuff like that on most TV shows. This series may not be good, but at least it isn’t respectable.
79. Dark Matter (Apple, Season 1). Two Jennifer Connelly shows in the bottom 10? Am I living in some sort of dark parallel universe? But of course that’s the problem with Dark Matter: It’s so obsessed with mapping the contours of its labyrinthine world(s), it fails to properly define its characters. That doesn’t mean the series is devoid of pleasure; Connelly and Joel Edgerton are watchable (as is Alice Braga), and there are moments when the multi-verse conceit inspires genuine imagination as opposed to mystery-solving tedium. But on the whole, the show feels like an endurance test, forcing you to constantly race alongside its heroes as they try to figure out what the hell is happening. That can work when said heroes are memorable, but here they’re just ciphers locked in an impenetrable box.
78. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon, Season 2; 2022 rank: 94). Speaking of endurance tests. There are roughly 300 major characters on this show, and every so often one of them says or does something mildly interesting. Otherwise I spend most of my time asking annoying logistical questions like who’s that? and where are they going? and how much did you pay Ciarán Hinds? The impressive production values ensure that The Rings of Power has a relatively high floor—there are always gorgeous landscapes or alluring costumes to admire—and when the show locks in, it can deliver an invigorating set piece. But the series’ abiding tone remains one of tautological self-gratification: It takes place in Middle-Earth; therefore, it is good. That may be enough for Tolkien diehards, but when simply discovering a character’s name is meant to serve as an awe-inspiring moment, the rest of us are left out in the gorgeously rendered cold.
77. Constellation (Apple, Season 1): See: Matter, Dark.
76. Orphan Black: Echoes (AMC, Season 1). As creative ideas go, resurrecting the Orphan Black universe isn’t completely bankrupt; the mythology, while already complex, afforded plenty of room for additional exploration about human identity and scientific ethics. But Echoes lacks the artistry or intelligence to justify its own existence. The premise wisely doesn’t force Krysten Ritter to mimic Tatiana Maslany’s historic greatness—she plays a single genetically engineered woman, not a host of temperamentally different clones—and Keeley Hawes emotes credibly, especially in a haunting flashback episode. (Amanda Fix shows promise as a teenage version of Ritter’s character.) But the execution is just too tentative, too indebted, to invest its characters or its story with any real intrigue or mystery. The title proves all too fitting: In the end, Echoes is a mere imitation.
Coming later today: gladiators, aviators, investigators, and forefathers.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.