Our countdown of every TV show of 2024 rolls on. If you missed prior installments, check out the following links:
60. Echo (Disney, Season 1). There’s something unsavory about the Marvel machine cautiously extending its brand into marginalized areas; you can practically hear Disney execs proclaiming, “See, look how progressive we are! Now leave us alone and let us count our money.” But questionable motivations aside, Echo—which centers on a deaf Native American assassin (Alaqua Cox), previously introduced in Hawkeye—mostly works on its own terms. Despite being filmed in the usual Atlanta backlots, it carries a real sense of place, and more importantly, its action scenes have real snap and dynamism (unusual for the choreography-indifferent MCU). And while integrating its universe with Daredevil smacks of fan service (were Marvel bros really clamoring to see Vincent D’Onofrio again?), Echo otherwise feels sharp and self-contained, telling its own story rather than serving as a mere bridge between past and future productions. It’s nothing special, which is part of what makes it watchable.
59. Dune: Prophecy (HBO, Season 1). Speaking of brand extensions: Is the Dune mythology really so popular that it warrants its own TV spin-off? To the extent Prophecy succeeds, it’s thanks to the sheer muscularity that HBO’s vast resources afford it: the cavernous halls, the filigreed detail, the overall enormity. It looks very expensive, and Emily Watson and Olivia Williams are both nicely cast. Yet aside from a partial flashback episode that deepens the characters’ motivations, the storytelling here never gets off the ground; it just feels like perpetual setup, priming us for future episodes of galaxy-spanning mayhem. I’ll be happy to revisit this handsomely appointed universe when it returns, at which point I hope it focuses less on the future and more on the present.
58. Sweetpea (Starz, Season 1). Ella Purnell has something. Maybe it’s the eyes, maybe it’s the accent, but there’s a quality about her that makes you pay attention. (I will forever savor the moment in Yellowjackets’ first-season title sequence when she makes a throat-slash gesture and then winks at the camera.) That’s crucial to Sweetpea, in which Purnell plays a timid receptionist who acquires a taste for murdering the abusive men who’ve conspired to make her life miserable. In narrative terms, the show isn’t wholly convincing, with too many contrivances and phony developments. (Its evocation of work at a small-town newspaper is similarly unpersuasive.) But Purnell imbues its in-your-face message with a certain edge, lending credibility to the preposterous plot. With a heart-stopping stare like hers, the bloody knife she brandishes is almost superfluous.
57. Clipped (FX on Hulu, Season 1). The problem with turning real-life sports into fictionalized entertainment is that you need to impose order on events that tend to be heavily random; it’s easy to suggest that the Los Angeles Clippers lost their playoff matchup against the Oklahoma City Thunder because the Donald Sterling tape leaked, but that tidy logic ignores a host of other variables in play. Still, despite its simplistic approach, Clipped is suitably engrossing as a portrait of the racial fault lines within a basketball team, and of the tricky relationship between millionaire employees and their billionaire “owner.” Yet what really lingers from the show is the disturbing marriage between Sterling and his wife, Shelly (an excellent Jacki Weaver), who’s revealed as a toxic enabler rather than a passive victim. There’s too much going on in Clipped for everything to resonate, but it does demonstrate how Sterling’s pernicious behavior extended far beyond the court.
56. Kaos (Netflix, Season 1). “Jeff Goldblum as Zeus” is an instantly gripping logline, and for the most part, Kaos fulfills its potential for the way it gives ancient mythology a cheeky modern slant. The show is fun, with sharp imagery, a distinctive tone, and a solid cast (David Thewlis and Cliff Curtis? On this Olympus?). And yet, the persistent glibness creates a distancing effect, preventing us from getting close to the characters and minimizing their immortal exploits. The exception is Killian Scott’s Orpheus, a strangely decent dude who becomes obsessed with rescuing his wife (Aurora Perrineau’s Eurydice Riddy, didn’t you take a Classics course or at least listen to Arcade Fire?), even though she no longer loves him. Classic Zeus, making the most interesting person be just another self-absorbed white dude.
55. Monsieur Spade (AMC, Season 1). I’m not convinced that the story here—an elaborate mesh of threads involving duplicitous nuns, French gangsters, and an Algerian sniper—really tracks. But sometimes the mere premise is enough, especially when that premise involves Clive Owen speaking hard-boiled dialogue and wearing fedoras while trying to protect a rebellious teenager who may or may not be his daughter. (I’m not being coy; I honestly don’t remember.) Like most mystery series, Monsieur Spade is too complicated to be truly absorbing. But its sense of style, of confidence, is irresistible. You watch this show to hear its characters talk, even if you don’t understand what the hell they’re saying.
54. The Old Man (FX, Season 2; 2022 rank: 31 of 110). Speaking of complicated, there is way too much going on here for my dementia-addled brain to follow: double-crosses, hidden oil reserves, Chinese moles, precious antidotes, and lots more. As a spy show, The Old Man doesn’t have as much oomph as I’d like; there are some shootouts and brawls and chases, but they lack real vigor. (Jeff Bridges’ dogs, so memorably lethal in the pilot, are sadly kept on a leash this time around.) And yet, there’s a curious humanity beneath all of the hijinks—not only in Alia Shawkat’s reckoning with her own heritage, but in Amy Brenneman’s disconcertion over the type of woman she’s become, and whether she was that way all along. “I’m a person who breaks things,” she says, and while her tone is doleful, I’m grateful for this show’s syncopated energy. Sometimes genre conventions need to get, if not demolished, at least shaken up.
53. The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Peacock, Season 1). No, we probably didn’t need another Holocaust drama, and the bleakness of this series—about the moral compromises that a prisoner made in order to survive—is as familiar as it is severe. But what makes The Tattooist of Auschwitz interesting is how it plays with time and memory. The underlying novel has apparently received criticism for historical inaccuracies, yet the show’s chief insight is how truth can be subjective—how our minds can warp it as a defensive mechanism, reframing the past in a different light. It’s crucial that we never forget; it’s also important to scrutinize how we remember.
52. Queenie (Hulu, Season 1). Given that you can’t take streamers at their word—“Netflix reports that its seventh-season premiere of Volcano Death Trap received 14.6 jillion eyeballs within its first nine hours,” yeah sure—it’s impossible to track how many people watch particular TV shows these days. But my sense is that Queenie flew under the mainstream radar, which is kind of a bummer. It’s far from perfect—the pacing can be rushed, and the style is uneven—but it’s confident and decisive. That’s true not just for its geographic and demographic specificity (chronicling the struggles of a Black woman in London), but also for its recognition of How We Live Now—how modernity is both a cesspit of toxicity and a utopia of connectivity. One theoretical appeal of the streaming boom was its potential to democratize television. Yet while it’s cool that individuated shows like Queenie exist, it’s also fair to question if they’re an endangered species.
51. Fallout (Amazon, Season 1). Ella Purnell, again! She’s going places; maybe someday one of those places will even be the big screen. Anyway, as somehow who’s never played the RPG, I was able to appreciate the way this adaptation confidently builds its demented world without being soured by the stench of familiarity. And hell, any show where Walton Goggins plays a noseless cretin called The Ghoul is going to hook me. In terms of structure, Fallout is a bit unsure of itself; there are times when it seems to strike the ideal balance between serialized and episodic, but it lacks the confidence to truly commit to an ambitious mode of storytelling. Still, there’s enough strangeness on display to keep things lively, and the actors are good enough to prevent the show from relying purely on its what-the-hell-happened plot. It’s pleasant viewing, even if it won’t blow your mind or blow up the world.
Coming later today: teachers, lovers, dictators, and lawyers.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.