We’re counting down every TV show we watched in 2024—all 88 of them. If you missed the first episode (get it?), you can find it here.
75. Those About to Die (Peacock, Season 1). Ancient Rome must have been wild—the spectacle, the violence, the corruption, the orgies, the togas. All of those constitute strong ingredients for a juicy melodrama, but Those About to Die lacks the finesse or intelligence to brew them into an appealing stew. It’s all surface-level; sure, there’s plenty of nudity and blood (not to mention some ghastly computer-aided chariot races), but there’s no human depth underlying all of the boning and backstabbing. Gladiator II may not have been a good movie, but at least its evocation of the Colosseum inspired some awe. The Rome of this show feels more like a chintzy tourist trap.
74. Masters of the Air (Apple, Season 1). This is probably the quintessential 2024 TV show. It has solid, good-looking actors, led by Austin Butler and Callum Turner. It has an appropriately sonorous tone. It has handsome production values (although the choreography of the dogfights is lackluster). It chronicles a significant period of 20th-century history. And it hardly ever makes an impression with any lasting vividness. (The exception: a sojourn in London, where the electric Joanna Kulig pops off the screen.) Aside from some illegible action, there’s nothing wrong with Masters of the Air; virtually everything about it is fine. It is simply disposable, lacking any excitement or oomph. It turns the Greatest Generation into a footnote.
73. The Madness (Netflix, Season 1). This one is at least marginally memorable, thanks to Colman Domingo’s reliable charisma. And theoretically, The Madness scores points for its topical agenda, focusing not just on American racism, but also the poisonous way in which right-wing operatives can wield online media to infect their base with hatred. (Plus, Alison Wright shows up as an amoral assassin named Julia Jayne, hell yeah.) Yet the show just doesn’t work—not as a Hitchcockian thriller, not as a polemical grenade lobbed at our national institutions, and not as a family melodrama. For all of its putative craziness, The Madness plays as typical Netflix fodder, taking up streaming space without supplying any aesthetic or thematic distinction. It belongs less in the asylum than the content mill.
72. Bad Sisters (Apple, Season 2; 2022 rank: 74 of 110). I have long since stopped kvetching about networks turning self-contained miniseries into multi-season arcs; the business model is such that it’s safer to churn out more of the same than to risk making anything new. Still, while these mercenary extensions occasionally validate themselves on the merits (remember Season 2 of The White Lotus? It ruled!), more often they end up like, well, this—soggy, strained, pointless. It isn’t fair to accuse Bad Sisters of simply running it back; its new villain embodies a more slippery sort of evil than Claes Bang’s contemptible husband, and Fiona Shaw flutters on the margins doing interesting stuff. But the storyline here is a complete mess—a half-baked amalgam of red herrings, dubious twists, and weak supporting characters. It’s annoying, because when the show just focuses on the titular siblings and lets them clown around, it’s enjoyable. What it really needed to murder was the mystery itself.
71. Squid Game (Netflix, Season 2; 2021 rank: 33 of 108). Sorry, what was I just saying about limited series shamelessly propagating themselves? As a piece of blunt-force entertainment, Squid Game still has some juice, with colorful iconography and gnarly violence. The problem is that all of that stuff already existed the first time around, so now it just feels like a lazy retread. To the extent Season 2 attempts to tweak its formula—integrating its bad guy more directly, adding a bizarre subplot about an abused guard—it mostly stumbles, failing to develop any human resonance. The games themselves are where the excitement lies, and they’re reasonably suspenseful, but even they can’t help feeling secondhand. Capitalism may engender a dog-eat-dog society, but that doesn’t mean this show needed to feast on its own corpse.
70. Silo (Apple, Season 2; last year: 51 of 94). Hey, it only took 19 series before we finally landed on a show that aired in back-to-back years! Unlike less reputable follow-ups, Silo earned its right to return, especially given that its first season ended with a memorable cliffhanger. What’s curious is that, where previously the series was cohesive by design—after all, the entire remnant of civilization was crammed into the same narrow, cylindrical space—it now splits down the middle, resulting in a show that’s half-good, half-terrible. Naturally, the positive material involves Rebecca Ferguson, who stumbles upon an eccentric loner (an enjoyable Steve Zahn) and whose problem-solving adventures are imaginative and suspenseful. They also feel entirely removed from the rest of Silo, both geographically and qualitatively; everything involving the rest of the cast, which is both too large and too boring, is risible—unconvincing world-building, faltering dialogue, feeble character dynamics. Time to get everyone back under one roof.
69. Manhunt (Apple, Season 1). Cinema and television represent two different forms of storytelling, and I generally disfavor pining for one when discussing the other. And yet: Shouldn’t this show have been a movie? The subject matter, about the government’s frantic search for John Wilkes Booth in the wake of the Lincoln assassination, is instantly absorbing, and it’s always nice to see Tobias Menzies in the lead. (As for Hamish Linklater as Lincoln, well, he’s not exactly Daniel Day-Lewis.) But the series’ scope is far too broad, trying to wrestle with the vampiric endurance of the post-war Confederacy but really just needlessly padding things. The title implies a taut, sweaty police procedural. Next time, just make that.
68. Franklin (Apple, Season 1). It’s hard for me to tell if this series is a major disappointment or as good as it could have possibly been. A portrait of one of America’s forefathers sounds like an engaging project, but it also carries the potential for stuffy sermonizing and putrid hagiography. To its credit, Franklin relays a relatively narrow slice of history, focusing on its subject’s tireless efforts to secure French support for the Revolutionary War. And Michael Douglas, while not immune to some lofty speeches, imbues the man with cagey intelligence and twinkly sex appeal. Still, the storytelling here is fairly banal, plodding forward without adding any dimension to its characters. It’s not awful; it just lacks electricity.
67. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu, Season 4; last year: 49). In the abstract, I’m pleased that this series keeps airing every year, despite the silliness of its premise; there’s something to be said for TV shows that keep cranking out new episodes on schedule, rather than waiting for true artistic inspiration (and letting things calcify in the process). The problem is that the latest season of Only Murders in the Building just isn’t very good. The central mystery is a dud, but more distressingly, the comedy is less punchy and agile, relying on celebrity star power rather than quality writing. The three leads are still good together, and the season is hardly devoid of laughs. But the zip, the vivacity, seems to have vanished. Fingers crossed that the next dead body will bring it back to life.
66. The Veil (FX on Hulu, Season 1). This series is far from good; it’s hilariously overplotted, it relies too heavily on a pointless (and traumatic!) backstory, and its grasp of geopolitical intrigue is, shall we say, unconvincing. But it still has a few things going for it. To begin with, it’s a spy show, meaning it scratches my itch for espionage entertainment: the code names, the countersurveillance, the swapped-out SIM cards. Beyond that (and a delightfully louche Josh Charles), Elisabeth Moss is just great. You could argue she’s just redirecting the single-minded intensity that she brings to The Handmaid’s Tale, and maybe that’s true, but I don’t care because that intensity is downright electric; when she holds a close-up, the screen threatens to melt from the heat. I couldn’t begin to tell you what The Veil is about, but I never got tired of watching Moss slice her way through it.
65. The Perfect Couple (Netflix, Season 1). It would appear we’ve reached the “trashily enjoyable” section of our programming. As a murder mystery, The Perfect Couple is pretty lousy, with the usual red herrings and cheap reveals; worse, its cliffhanger style prioritizes the destination over the journey. Nor does it work as a social satire of moneyed elites. And yet: Those Cape Cod beaches! Liev Schreiber’s dad bod! Dakota Fanning and Jack Reynor stuffing wedding cake in their mouths! To hell with character development and narrative plausibility, let’s dance!
64. The Boys (Amazon, Season 4; 2022 rank: 75). It’s a lot. I applaud this show for at least trying to say stuff: about hero worship, about the right-wing media ecosystem, about political horse-trading, about cheating on your octopus girlfriend with a colleague whose kink is a lobotomy. There are theoretical ideas at work here. They just aren’t argued with any real cogency. To its credit, The Boys has gradually shifted from its initial premise (superheroes are really just corporate pawns, ha!) into something more slippery and strange. But it’s still too enamored with blunt-force shocks, with extreme swings, with garish violence that proudly announces itself as so much more mature than those PG-13 Marvel flicks. There’s a decent and even provocative TV series in here somewhere, if only it didn’t keep going through puberty.
63. Three Women (Starz, Season 1). Speaking of saying stuff: Evaluated purely in terms of its themes, Three Women is one of the most laudable shows on TV. It’s sex-positive, it cares deeply for its subjects, and (as its title suggests) it’s unapologetically feminist. Neat! But good art requires more than just nobility; it also needs persuasive writing and sturdy execution. And despite its bighearted warmth, the series falters—not because it’s preachy, but because it lacks detail and nuance. Though it proclaims to pay homage to the totality of female experience, it only features one character who provides any fresh perspective (Betty Gilpin’s frustrated housewife); everyone else feels like a simple vector for a familiar message. I hate dinging such an ambitious and socially conscious work, so in that sense the show fulfills one of its aims: making men feel bad about themselves.
62. Death and Other Details (Hulu, Season 1). On one level, this series is your typically plotty whodunit, with far too many fake-outs and reversals for its own good. But while Death and Other Details is overly complicated, it at least delivers its hacky twists with a welcome degree of style, distinguishing itself from the parade of modern murder mysteries. Nearly a year later, I can scarcely remember who the killer even was, but I do recall the slick camerawork and playful aesthetic. And for a series about the supposed rigors of investigative work, it leaves for future showrunners a crucial clue: If you’re going to burden your heroine with a tragic backstory, at least be sure to give her a memorable haircut.
61. Sunny (Apple, Season 1). Yet another mystery series, Sunny half-succeeds for a different reason: It’s weird. The beats may be customary (dead husband, underworld shenanigans, etc.), but the world-building is appealing, creating a tonally fluid universe that’s simultaneously realistic and eccentric. That extends to the titular robot, which seems to fluctuate from cheerful helpmeet to diabolical villain to avenging angel. I never understood what the hell was going on in this show, partly because I couldn’t remember the revelations from one episode to the next. (Dear Apple: Include recaps on your weekly series, please!) But even if Sunny is impenetrable, it is at least distinctive, with its own immersive vibe. Leave it to the show about the robot to have a genuine personality.
Coming tomorrow: athletes, gumshoes, gods, and journalists.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.