TVtterboxd

At this point I’m nearly screaming for Letterboxd to stop equivocating and fully integrate TV logging into their interface. This is less out of fealty to one art form or another (or worse, some intimation that they are somehow the same) and more a distaste with half-measures. You can review some TV on the platform but not all; and in cases where you can’t, the Letterboxd user base is finding a workaround anyway, like uploading Marvel’s What If…? posters to the entries for the 2013 feature film The F-Word.

In any event: I started tracking my TV watching on Letterboxd in 2024 regardless, using a clumsy running list in most cases, but it sure makes articles like this easier to write. Since there are no rules here anyway, here’s the rundown of the best stuff I watched in 2024, whether it was from this year or one of the innumerable years prior.

In no particular order:

Stuff from this year

True Detective: Night Country

After sitting out seasons two and three, I could not actually wait to dive into this Pizzolatto-free refresh; firstly because Issa Lopez rules, and second because its long-night murder-mystery in the howling snowstorms of Alaska is so completely my vibe. Now: I know it's not exactly reasonable to want the show to be exactly like this forever, but, it could be and I'd be fine with it. I'll miss Kali Reis, if an when Lopez makes good on a mooted season five.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Surprise sur-fucking-prise, Donald Glover and his team still make exceptional television.

The Bear

Surprise sur-fucking-prise again, cousins. Look: everyone who said this season was some kind of a letdown is just bad at everything.

Industry

With the Pet Shop Boys needle-drop at the end of its third-season premiere, Industry abandoned the shivering fawn-legs of its first two seasons and doubled, no tripled, down on the delirious pleasures of its core premise: rich, beautiful assholes fucking and fucking up. Down one David Jonsson (boo!) and up one Kit Harrington (yay!), season three is a spellbinding showcase for Marisa Abela, who turns in the year’s best performance, accompanied by stunner supporting turns from Myha’la and Sagar Radia. But it’s probably hollow, inept Rob (Harry Lawtey) frantically having one off with the love of his life seconds before she vanishes into a Phantom Zone of her own creation that I’ll take with me to my grave.

Star Trek: Prodigy

With all love and respect to the Lower Deckers gutted by their own loss, the best Star Trek animated series that ended before its time in 2024 wasn’t even Star Trek: Lower Decks… it was Star Trek: Prodigy, which came and went with a single-day dump of its second/final season on Netflix (if you live in the States) and nowhere else (if you’re Canadian). The blu-ray of the gorgeous final run is out now, so you can watch how the kid-friendly first season has been carefully morphed into a distinctly YA-ified second season… which also happens to be the best single season of Star Trek since the sixth year of Deep Space Nine.

Sweetpea

Not enough people are talking about Ella Purnell’s year: in 2024 alone, the erstwhile Yellowjackets bestie headlined Fallout and Sweetpea in live action, and Prodigy and Arcane in animation. She is far and away the year’s MVP, and Sweetpea (probably the least-seen of the above mentions) is a perfect vehicle for her slippery skillset.

Agatha All Along

What slump? Marvel came roaring back in the back half of 2024; both Agatha and the final season of What If…? are as good as anything they’ve done, which means they are Top Twenty Marvel for me, a bracket which has replaced Top Ten Marvel and Top Five Marvel as the water-mark for “real good.”

Arcane: League of Legends

When the legends are written about this decade, Arcane will be right up there as a monumental creative achievement, a two-season animated gut punch that was basically perfect in season one and yet somehow manages to leap so many levels in every single act of season two that it almost feels like a completely different show. Flowers for everyone here: a pitch-perfect voice cast, a directing team unafraid to use the language of style itself to communiate theme, and the most gorgeous visual design in decades. This was the best television series of the year, by far.

Skeleton Crew

The worst thing about Skeleton Crew is simply that it made me understand more painfully how wide The Acolyte (which I nonetheless maintain had plenty of riches of its own) had frequently been of its own mark. Everything else about SCrew (sorry!) is sunshine and gumdrups, and though I acknowledge that the first season of The Mandalorian was crucial in its own right, a big part of me wishes Skeleton Crew had been the project that launched the era of Disney+ Star Wars: it's a perfect melding of form and function and Big Brand Energy, and if all that's not to your taste, it's still a faithful weekly reminder that feeling like a kid again is only one too-big-for-you adventure away.

Stuff from prior years that I caught up on

The Act

The first few months of 2024 were a weirdly intense time if you were following the Gypsy-Rose Blanchard story at all; I had never heard of her before December 28 2023, but in the early weeks of January I watched the documentary and the Lifetime series and the mini-series… and then things started to get really weird, so I decided that maybe hers was a narrative I should leave behind. Still, the 2019 mini-series is one of the best things I watched this year, and Joey King and Patricia Arquette’s central performances are exceptional.

The entire Apple TV+ science fiction slate

Look, the rumours are true: they’re the best, nearly only, game in town for smart sci fi in the streaming era. In Q1, I spent a delirious run of weeks devouring Foundation, For All Mankind, Silo and Severance in short order, and they’re all… fantastic.

Foundation probably remains my favourite — it’s the best-looking series on television, at a fifth of The Rings of Power’s budget, plus Lee Pace — but no shit, Severance is an extraordinary piece of writing, performance, and production. Silo, much like Night Country, is entirely my vibe; and For All Mankind is dumb as a bag of hammers, yet is easily the most compulsively-watchable show I’ve seen in years.

W1A

For all the degree to which many of my friends have told me that this show “is just like [place you used to work]!” the real sensation of finally watching W1A was moreover a profound, almost bewildered, respect for its ability to throw spoken language entirely out the window and yet somehow still tell a story: a story of people stuck in a bureaucratic hellworld where the English language has no meaning, but they are still forced to use it. It’s extraordinary writing, carried by an incredible cast. Hugh Skinner’s Will is the most marvellous performance of a stupid person that I’ve ever seen.

Paper Girls

Cancelled after one season a couple of years ago and nowhere near as solid as the science fiction wonders I annotated above, Paper Girls gets by on the exceptional charm of its four lead actresses, all of whom are sharply cast to both fulfill and expand the characterizations inherited from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic. The tampon scene is an all-timer.

And now, the links

• How Disney Finally Made Streaming Profitable. The disclaimers on this interview alone make the read worthwhile, if maybe not all the queasy feelings afterwards. (Vulture)
• “What are you gonna do? Are you going to yell at cars all day, because you really loved horses?” A bracingly clear-headed talk about the state of A.I. in screenwriting from Craig Main and John August, which just happens to apply to [insert any creative discipline here]. (Scriptnotes Podcast)
• On the other hand, this made me want to actually throw this device in the river and run into the woods and never come back. What the fuck IS all this!! (No seriously: I didn’t even make it to the “bit of good news” at the end, the first time.) Anyway, cheers. (The Honest Broker)
• I was actually pretty content during “null week,” but yes, even I occasionally needed to remind myself that nothing actually feels right, just now, and that’s okay (Culture Study)
• Happy New Year! And thank you, all, for subscribing to this newsletter. Here’s the most (possibly, only) relaxing thing I saw in 2024. Love you. (TikTok)