The Best TV of 2024: From a Sterling “Shōgun” to the Tear-Tugging “One Day”

If political analysts are to be believed, the 2024 presidential election was determined — to at least some degree — by a war of values and opinions that may well continue into the new year and beyond. (If you were someone who actually enjoyed all the stressful brouhaha leading up to Nov. 5, congratulations to you and your six or seven fellow Americans.)

TV, at least, promised its usual escape into a realm of entertainment. But, in fact, the best new programs have been smartly attuned to what's going on in the country's culture. The wonderful first season of Shōgun, for one, reboots a 1980 Richard Chamberlain miniseries with much greater fidelity to the actual Japanese customs of the 17th century—to Japan's historical identity, so to speak. (Identity, in case you haven't noticed, is a big deal). Disclaimer, a glossy melodrama, manages to tackle the highly contestable issue of who gets to speak his or her narrative, and whether that narrative has to be believed. (It helps to have two formidable talents, Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, carrying a show's weight like twin Atlases.) Meanwhile, a new sitcom, English Teacher, gently lampoons the sometimes intimidating rules of correctness without offending anyone.

If that makes these shows sound like a slog or a chore, then I need to clarify and point out that they are all, in one way or the other, exciting viewing experiences.

You may also wonder why The Bear, after two seasons in the top 10, is missing this year. That's because season 3 spent too much time letting chefs, real and fictional, discuss the nirvana a chef experiences running a restaurant kitchen. A lovely indulgence, I guess, but not especially relevant in 2024. Here we go.

Related: Disclaimer Review: Cate Blanchett Plays a Journalist in Danger of Being Canceled in the Gripping Apple TV+ Series

1. Shōgun (FX on Hulu) The year’s most distinguished show, winner of 18 Emmys, Shōgun can admittedly be challenging. The pace is often as stately as the procession of a feudal lord—the series is almost top-heavy with its immensely detailed sets and costumes. Plus, most of the dialogue is in Japanese with subtitles, and you'll very likely have to spend a few episodes making sense of the dynastic feuds and sorting out the characters, all of them furtive and concealed in lavish robes—this was a civilization that understood layering. Eventually, though, the series becomes a thrilling, immersive experience, a labyrinth of conspiracies, wars and betrayals. Shōgun can be described as Game of Thrones without dragons. Shōgun, though, has sharper teeth and a deeper bite.

In an early episode, an impulsive vassal, after making a display of temper and defiance at court, is expected not only to commit ritual suicide but to allow his infant son to be executed, as well—to extinguish his now-disgraced bloodline. And he submits, willingly, leaving behind a distraught widow who wishes she could follow her husband and child into death. This is worse than a dragon, wouldn't you say? This is worse than green fire.

Related: Is Shōgun a True Story? All About the Real-Life Rulers and Events That Inspired the Show

2. Disclaimer (Apple TV+) Cate Blanchett plays a celebrated documentarian journalist with a name out of Tudor romance—can't you just see "Catherine Ravenscroft" galloping off on a horse while clutching a keepsake of her dead lover's hair in a blood-stained locket? However, this is a very modern tale: Catherine has covered up a serious blemish on her past, and now she’s about to be outed—and canceled—by a dour, middle-class school teacher (Kevin Kline), the vengeful father of a young man she may have had a fling with a few decades back (the kid ended up dead). The show is visually flawless, as you'd expect from anything directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity), and morally slippery: It's a banana peel waiting to encounter the heels of the privileged.

Note: When I first watched the series, the wrap-up felt dishonest and a bit too easy to me. On a second viewing, as I was swept up in Blanchett's long, anguished explication of the true story (or what's deemed to be the true story) of the young man's death, I decided that this wasn't pat, after all. It's just that the show's elusive, fragmented narrative can throw you.

3. Ripley (Netflix) Andrew Scott gives an alluringly sinister—maybe definitive—performance as Tom Ripley, the reptilian psychopath created by author Patricia Highsmith in her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. The novel was already the source for the terrific 1999 film (the one with Matt Damon, pale and wormy, in chartreuse swim trunks) and 1960s French classic Purple Noon (starring international sex symbol Alain Delon, who could be described, ironically or not, as "to die for"). Scott, though, is the first star to nail the book's depiction of homosexuality as its own normalcy—even if Ripley has a sick habit of murdering anyone on the verge of uncovering his secrets.

Related: Ripley Review: Andrew Scott's Black and White Netflix Thriller Will Make You Forget Fleabag's 'Hot Priest'

4. True Detective: Night Country (HBO) This crime series has shown signs of rigor mortis since its superb first season, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, but Jodie Foster rekindles it as an Alaskan cop trying to solve a case involving a group of scientists found frozen outside in the endless night—their icy, intertwined bodies look like a Jeff Koons sculpture commemorating the victims of some unspecified but annihilating natural disaster. The season preserves some of the show's discombobulating philosophical approach to murder, as if it were on some level the manifestation of a morally wobbly universe spinning into darkness. Whatever.

Related: True Detective's Kali Reis Shines a Light on Indigenous Issues: 'I Get to Voice the Voiceless' (Exclusive)

5. Matlock (CBS) This is not your grandfather’s Matlock, no siree—which isn't to say that your grandfather ever had any inclination to watch the old CBS legal series starring Andy Griffiths. (Maybe he liked The Jewel in the Crown over on PBS.) Anyway, this is a clever, comfortably plush reboot. Kathy Bates, that great, endlessly resourceful actress, is Madeline Matlock, an attorney with a secret mission—of revenge! To pull it off, though, she puts on a rather humbling routine at the firm that just took her on. She pretends that she's earnest, willing, folksy and sweet—an ideal colleague, really. (In a bit of meta humor, she also keeps reminding people that her surname is, yes, the same as the one on that earlier CBS series. Ha ha.) Bates knows exactly how to let us savor the duality of the role—the wolf both in sheep's clothing and out.

6.The Perfect Couple (Netflix) This is one of Nicole Kidman’s light, bingeable star vehicles. It's a ceaseless party menu of canapes, provided by an expert caterer who gives you appetizing snacks without trying to come up with anything remotely innovative. Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a successful novelist hosting a grand wedding party at her breathtaking home in Nantucket. Sadly, a corpse discovered in the waters just beyond the house mucks up the divine press coverage Greer had been arranging with—huh!—People magazine. Now she, her family and guests—a bunch of vipers a snake handler wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole—will be caught up in a murder mystery. The Perfect Couple never answers the most pressing question: Why is French film legend Isabelle Adjani part of the cast? But Kidman's performance is crisp and smart and posh. If you want serious Nicole, there’s Prime Video’s very thoughtful, very glum Expats.

7. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Prime Video) Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s slinkily sexy spy movie (2005) gets glammed down into a clever series with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as agents awkwardly forging a relationship. This is a fresh and ingenious angle, especially now that the gorgeous partnership that was Brangelina isn't much more than a faded, tattered image on a Sunset Boulevard billboard. Good to meet you, new Smiths!

8. Baby Reindeer (Netflix). An intravenous, vein-burning mix of pathos and loathing, this British series about a comic (Richard Gadd) and his stalker (Emmy-winner Jessica Gunning) is the year’s most talked-about show. You either binge through it, squirming but riveted by its raw depiction of psychosexual obsession and guilt (his as well as hers), or you're repelled and decide you're better off with The Diplomat. But Baby Reindeer is worth the watch, concluding with an unforgettable moment when Gadd, who based the show on his own experience with a female stalker, seems to finally comprehend how greatly the woman who made him suffer has herself suffered—a good more than he did, you could say.

9. English Teacher (FX). Brian Jordan Alvarez is the creator and star of this quietly provocative (or, to settle on another adjective, subversive) sitcom about Evan, a gay teacher who can’t always make sense of what’s politically correct based on the enlightened perspective of his students, their parents and his colleagues. Example: When Evan begins a lesson on the novel Love in the Time of Cholera, Kayla (Roma Mars), a student seated at the front of the class, nervously objects that any discussion of illness is triggering for her. She suffers from what she calls self-diagnosed, asymptomatic Tourette's syndrome (eventually the condition is renamed KS, or Kayla Syndrome).

The show isn't satiric so much as amused by the absurd lengths to which the Kaylas of our society will go in pursuit of self-definition. When Evan seems baffled by the logic of the disease now called KS, another student, condescendingly deadpan, asks: "Are you getting that? Does that make sense to you, sir?" No.

10. One Day (Netflix) This fine, sob-inducing British series follows two friends (Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall) who feel romance tugging at their hearts for years and years and years. Years. It's very much in the British tradition of sustained, frustrated erotic tension—1993's Remains of the Day, for instance, or the revered 1945 film Brief Encounter. Maybe that's why the show feels like such a soothingly nostalgic ride. No one on Bridgerton, despite it being set in the 19th century, would be as patient as these two.

Also: one bonus honoree that premiered too late for my print deadline ...

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11. Black Doves (Netflix) Frankly, if I could go back and tweak my list in the Dec, 16 issue of People, I'd drop The Perfect Couple for this winning British diversion, a six-part thriller starring Keira Knightley. She's Helen, an agent passing on tips from high up in the Prime Minister's office to a clandestine agency (her loving husband happens to be Britain's defense minister). But Helen makes an error of the heart: She takes a lover, to whom she confesses her true identity. When he winds up murdered, her cover is threatened—at which point her old friend Sam, a fixer and assassin played by Ben Whishaw, is called in to clean up the mess she's created. Whishaw, it has to be said, can't help being adorable, even when he's gunning people down in cold blood.

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