MovieManifesto

Nearly there now. All week we’ve been ranking every TV show of 2024, and today we’re revealing the honorable mentions. For prior installments, check out the following links:

#s 88-76
#s 75-61
#s 60-51
#s 50-41
#s 40-31
#s 30-21

20. Under the Bridge (Hulu, Season 1). Oh, great, another true-crime show. But what’s gratifying about Under the Bridge is that it’s less a conventional murder mystery than a tender and searching portrait of a particular community. Most whodunits are structured such that they gradually crescendo until their final reveal of the killer (which is invariably uninteresting), but the identity of the perpetrator here is almost beside the point (which is why it’s disclosed with several episodes remaining). The focus instead is on the small town’s residents, all of whom are plagued with a curious mixture of anguish and longing. Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone are both very good as (respectively) an inquisitive writer and a weary investigator, but Under the Bridge is most unsettling for its depiction of teenage dynamics—how the toxic combination of insecurity and bravado can lead to ghastly behavior. Yet while the dutiful reenactment of real-life tragedy carries an undeniably sordid quality, the dominant tone of this show is one of empathy; it extends genuine compassion to all of its inhabitants, be they victims or killers or just scared little girls doing their best to fit in. It asks not if you know where your children are, but if you know what they’re feeling. Read More

Moving right along, our rankings of every TV show of 2024 continue below. If you’d like to check out prior episodes, you can access them at the following links:

#s 88-76
#s 75-61
#s 60-51
#s 50-41
#s 40-31

30. Nobody Wants This (Netflix, Season 1). Kristen Bell and Adam Brody are cute together. That’s basically the entire appeal of this show, and if that sounds like faint praise, remember that the whole point of a romantic comedy is for the leads to be cute together. (Also cute together: Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons, who ably fulfill their “quirky sibling” roles while also evincing some angular chemistry of their own.) As a show with an aggressively simple premise—what if a rabbi fell in love with a gentile? could it work? what would his mother think???—Nobody Wants This is somewhat padded, and the dreaded “This could have been a movie!” critique arguably applies. But given the sparky energy between its leads, allowing us to spend extra time in its universe feels less like a curse than a mitzvah. Read More

Moving right along, our rankings of every TV show of 2024 continue below. If you’d like to check out prior episodes, you can access them at the following links:

#s 88-76
#s 75-61
#s 60-51
#s 50-41

40. Somebody Somewhere (HBO, Season 3; last year: 37 of 94). We generally apply the “Who asked for this?” rhetoric to sequels of works that already reached an obvious conclusion, like Bad Sisters or Big Little Lies. Somebody Somewhere is hardly so finite—its characters don’t solve crimes or get investigated, they just exist—so it seems churlish to complain that we received more episodes of it. That said, something about this (presumably) final season feels vaguely unnecessary, given how tenderly Season 2 wrapped things up; in particular, the decision to give Bridget Everett’s loner a love interest feels like a concession to the Valentine’s Day industrial complex. Still, this remains a beautifully observed show, with terrific interpersonal dynamics and an intuitive grasp of encroaching middle age, which is rarely depicted on TV at all, much less with such sensitivity and insight. Now it’s time to leave these flawed, wonderful people in peace. Read More

As the headline suggests, we’re continuing to rank every TV show of 2024. For previous installments, check out the following links:

#s 88-76
#s 75-61
#s 60-51

50. Creatures Commandos (Max, Season 1). I’m not a superhero fanboy, but I’m weirdly in the tank for James Gunn, having thoroughly enjoyed all three of his Guardians of the Galaxy movies, along with Peacemaker and his Suicide Squad reboot. Still, we’re getting dangerously close to oversaturation (need some Gunn control amirite), and on the surface, Creature Commandos—an animated series that follows a handful of lesser-known DC villains as they team up and save the world or whatever—feels a bit like grist for the content mill. But while the cartoonish mayhem can be perfunctory, there’s a surprising depth of character here; Gunn is a gifted writer who’s able to briskly humanize his freakish antiheroes, as well as provide them with a stream of quips. He also understands television, which is why each episode centers on a specific member of the titular tribe; I know critics are supposed to groan about backstory, but the concise flashbacks here are more affecting than the story proper. Creature Commandos may just be intellectual property, but that doesn’t mean it lacks intelligence. Read More