The best TV shows of 2024

It was a year of decisions, most of them clear-cut and easy, but when it came to choosing the “best” new shows of 2024 — a far more subjective choice than anything that appeared on a general election ballot — it’s been a tough call. This has been a quality year — ergo, the following list, presented in random order, shoehorns 18 series into 10 more or less themed slots. (And the list, which already excludes fine shows ongoing from earlier years, could easily have been longer.) Though Hollywood — post-pandemic, post-strike, post-whatever — has been in something of a slump, somehow great TV keeps happening. Less than great TV happens, as well, obviously, but there are more than enough blessings to count.

Is there anything definitive that might be said about these shows, some cultural movement that might be extracted from them? No. There are big historical dramas, avant-garde comedies, dual-reality science fiction series, cheeky period romps, true crime, personal tales in political frameworks, an eccentric comic mystery. And more. What they share is the sense that they have been made with evident commitment by people — people with a point of view, even a vision, not by an algorithm or artificial intelligence. (They call it AI, so you’ll forget about the artificial.) They’re humanistic, for want of a better word. And, for what’s it worth, they are all to my taste, which means that some of them have already been canceled.

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1. Noel Fielding in Apple TV+’s “The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin.” (Apple TV+) 2. Louisa Harland, left, Florence Keen and Bo Bragason in Disney’s “Renegade Nell.” (Disney+) 3. Lisa Kudrow, left, Rune Temte, Kal-El Tuck, Tadhg Murphy, Charlyne Yi and Roger Jean Nsengiyumva in Apple TV+’s “Time Bandits.” (Apple TV+)

Period satirical adventure comedies with thieves as heroes, tooled with a British or Australian sense of humor. “Dick Turpin” stars Noel Fielding, best known here from “The Great British Baking Show,” as a potted version of the legendary 17th century highwayman, the accidental leader of a gang of brigands. (Read the review.) “Renegade Nell,” from Sally Wainwright, is a supernatural period feminist adventure comedy, whose heroine (Louisa Harland) gains super-strength from a helpful pixie (Nick Mohammed); like “Dick Turpin,” it satirizes contemporary media in old clothes. (Read the review.) “Time Bandits,” a retooling of the Terry Gilliam film by Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, takes its rogue heroes, led by Lisa Kudrow, on the run both from the Supreme Being (Waititi) and Pure Evil (Clement), through a multiplicity of ages and places, like several compressed seasons of “Doctor Who.” (Read the review.)

Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada in FX’s “Shogun.”

(Katie Yu / FX)

Too big, too sumptuous, too grand, too Emmy-awarded, too popular to ignore. James Clavell‘s novel of love and politics in 1600 Japan and an Englishman who becomes a samurai, becomes a miniseries for the second time, with an especial eye to historic detail and a long roll of intriguing characters, major and minor. It’s the rare television drama that genuinely qualifies as epic. (Read the review.)

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1. Andrea Ellsworth and Vince Staples in Netflix’s “The Vince Staples Show.” (Netflix) 2. Julio Torres, star and creator of HBO’s “Fantasmas.” (Monica Lek / HBO)

Short-story comedies, each starring the creator as a version of himself, each with an impressive complement of guest stars, each with an off-kilter point of view. “The Vince Staples Show,” from the rapper-actor, comprises only five episodes set by turns in a jail cell, a bank robbery in progress, an amusement park, a family reunion and the course of a foot and car pursuit — through which the star stumbles with Keaton-esque grace. (Read the review.) In “Fantasmas,” from Julio Torres, odd threads involving the search for a lost earring, a worrisome birthmark and his quest to acquire “proof of existence” weave through odder diversions — a clear Crayola, dresses for toilets, a nightclub for gay hamsters, a call center staffed by mermaids, an abusive executive goldfish. Dreamlike, where “Vince Staples” is firmly rooted in waking reality, its sets are mere suggestions of sets: Projections, meant to look like projections, supply the perspective-altering backdrops. (Read the review.)

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1. Ted Danson in Netflix’s “A Man on the Inside.” (Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix) 2. Stephanie Koenig and Brian Jordan Alvarez in FX’s “English Teacher.” (Steve Swisher / FX)

In “A Man on the Inside,” from Michael “The Good Place” Schur, national treasure and longtime gift to television comedy Ted Danson stars as a widowed retiree whose idea of finding something to do is to hire himself out to a private detective and go undercover at a posh retirement home to solve the riddle of a missing necklace. Septuagenarian character actors have a field day. (Read the review.) “English Teacher,” from and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez, centers on an idealistic, perhaps too idealistic, high school teacher, surrounded by eccentric characters who read as original and human in a genre so easily dominated by type. (It is nothing like “Abbott Elementary,” except for also being great.) Both make me laugh a lot. (Read the review.)

Kristen Wiig in Apple TV+’s “Palm Royale.”

(Apple TV+)

A nutty, colorful, extravagantly designed period comedy of class, society and identity. Kristen Wiig stars in a complex performance as a naive social climber determined to find a place in 1969 Palm Beach society in the mistaken belief that it represents not only the good life but a good life. With Carol Burnett as a sidelined queen bee, who begins the series comatose and, as she recovers, pursues Wiig’s character with murderous intent and slapstick results, and father and daughter Bruce and Laura Dern as a father and daughter. (Read the review.)

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1. Joel Edgerton in Apple TV+’s “Dark Matter.” (Apple TV+) 2. Rosie/Davina Coleman and Noomi Rapace in Apple TV+’s “Constellation.” (Apple TV+)

Sci-fi series mainly about love, whose lead characters fall afoul of quantum physics and permeable realities. In the thriller “Dark Matter,” dissatisfied physics professor Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) is kidnapped into an alternate world by a version of himself, who takes his place in order to be married to Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) (understandable). A midlife drama cum action film, it isn’t subtle making its points about choice and regret, but it’s a good ride. (Read the review.) In the luminous, tense and deeply moving “Constellation,” set against outer space, suburban Cologne, Germany, and arctic fields of snow, Noomi Rapace plays an astronaut returned from a crippled International Space Station to find that nothing is quite as it was, not her husband, her daughter or even the color of their car. Characters struggle to connect across the divide; “Alice in Wonderland” is a touchstone. (Read the review.)

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1. Ewan McGregor in “A Gentleman in Moscow” on Paramount+ With Showtime. (Ben Blackall / Paramount+ With Showtime) 2. Hoa Xuande and Robert Downey Jr. in HBO’s “The Sympathizer.” (Hopper Stone / HBO)

Historical political dramas (not docudramas), with literary antecedents. Quietly romantic, somber yet whimsical, “A Gentleman in Moscow,” from the novel by Amor Towles, finds a well-used Ewan McGregor as a dignified aristocrat under permanent house arrest in the attic of Moscow’s last nice hotel after the Russian Revolution, as history rumbles along and people come and go. “It is the business of times to change,” he observes, as he fits himself to new realities. (Read the review). Set in the wake of the Vietnam War, “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen‘s novel, is a satirical tale set mainly in Southern California’s Vietnamese community. The Captain (Hoa Xuande), a spy for the Viet Cong during the war, is sent reluctantly to America to keep a watch on an expatriate general afterward. (Doubleness will prove exhausting.) Targets include Hollywood, academia and ideological certitude. Robert Downey Jr. plays four different characters, representing aspects of American self-satisfaction. (Read the review.)

Dionne Brown in Hulu’s “Queenie.”

(Latoya Okuneye / Lionsgate)

Newcomer Dionne Brown makes a spectacular impression in this lovely British quarter-life dramedy, based on a novel — often reviewed as a “Black ‘Bridget Jones’” — by showrunner Candice Carty-Williams. As Queenie, navigating empty relationships and professional disappointments on a journey from self-sabotage to self-worth, Brown makes a whole person from a variety of attitudes — hopeful, hopeless, hungover, exuberant, fretful, thoughtful. It’s a subtle performance of a big character, often trying, ultimately lovable. (Read the review.)

Joey King in Hulu’s “We Were the Lucky Ones.”

(Vlad Cioplea / Hulu)

An intelligent, feeling, multithread family drama that takes place in the context of, but not, as the title indicates, at the center of the Holocaust, it’s a study of character under the pressure of history. As things go from bad to worse in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Kurcs, an upper-middle-class and not at all homogeneous extended Jewish family, take divergent paths — paths that will sometimes meet again — to avoid being discovered, captured and/or murdered. (It’s never not the time to remind the world that Nazis were evil, and that antisemitism remains horribly present.) (Read the review.)

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1. Riley Keough, left, Izzy G. and Chloe Guidry in Hulu’s “Under the Bridge.” (Jeff Weddell / Hulu) 2. Carmen Maura, left, Victoria Bazua and Eva Longoria in Apple TV+’s “Land of Women.” (Manuel Fernandez-Valdes / Apple TV+) 3. Carrie Preston in “Elsbeth” on CBS. (Michael Parmelee / CBS)

Female-fronted mysteries in three keys. The downbeat “Under the Bridge,” based on the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old Indian-Canadian girl, stars Lily Gladstone as a dogged cop, Riley Keogh as a reporter back after a decade away from her hometown, and a talented cast of young actors, playing complex variations on the “Mean Girls” trope. (Read the review.) The romantic “Land of Women” finds Gala (Eva Longoria) and her mother, Julia, played by Pedro Almódovar muse Carmen Maura, hiding out in a small Spanish town from thugs — Longoria’s absent husband owes them money. There Gala gets involved in the struggling local wine business and with handsome Amat (Santiago Cabrera). (Read the review.) And in the “Columbo”-esque “Elsbeth,” Carrie Preston’s “The Good Wife” (and “The Good Fight”) titular character has been spun off into her own comic mystery as an NYPD detective in all but the badge, bringing each week’s guest star to justice. Wendell Pierce, who always brightens the room, co-stars as the exasperated chief. (Read the review.)