Josh’s Favorite TV Series of 2024 — Part Two!

Thanks for reading part one of my list of my favorite TV series of 2024!  Let’s continue with part two:

10. Agatha All Along — This delightful spin-off of Kathryn Hahn’s character of Agatha Harkness from WandaVision was such a fun surprise to me!  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what we got was a fun, silly, beautiful show crafted by show-runner Jac Schaeffer and her team.  Agatha all Along is a fun adventure story; it’s also a moving character piece, it’s a great genre yarn about witches, it’s a fun fantasy and a funny vehicle in which an ensemble of terrific actors can play and be silly.  It’s impressively well-crafted, in which all of the story threads are important and are woven together into a thrillingly satisfying tapestry by the time we reach the final episode.  (I wish more TV shows were this cleverly constructed!)  And it builds to a moving ending that left me eager for this story and these characters to continue.  What more could I ask for?  Kathryn Hahn knocked this way out of the park; bringing layers of nuance to her portrayal of Agatha without ever losing her saucy snarkiness.  I loved every one of the members of Agatha’s mis-matched coven, played by Patti LuPone, Aubrey Plaza,  Debra Jo Rupp, Sasheer Zamata, and Ali Ahn, and I appreciated how well the show developed and explored each character.  And we also got the first appearance of a terrific Jewish superhero and a wonderful character from the comics: Wiccan, brought to life with incredible skill by Joe Locke.  Again: what more could I ask for?  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Disney+.

9. Girls5Eva season 3 — Girls5Eva began with two terrific but little-seen seasons on Peacock in 2021 and 2022 before being cancelled.  Netflix blessedly resurrected the show this year, but sadly only made six new episodes before cancelling it again.  Sigh!  What a shame, because this is one of the best comedies in years, and this abbreviated third season (overseen by Meredith Scardino and produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock) was every bit as excellent as the first two.  The show centers on the four women who were, briefly, part of a one-hit-wonder girls’ group in 2000.  Unfortunately, their song “Quit Flying Planes at My Heart” was released on September 10th, 2001, and that was that.  Two decades later, though, the women decide to reunite and make another attempt at the stardom that eluded them when they were younger.  This is a very silly, very funny show, with a high joke-per-second quantity; it’s also a show with a lot to say about what it’s like being a woman in the United States today.  The combination is potent.  I deeply love all four of the show’s leads: Sara Bareilles (Waitress), Busy Philipps (Freaks and Geeks), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton, She-Hulk), and Paula Pell (currently starring in the Inside Out spin-off TV show Dream Productions).  The original songs are hilarious.  This is a great show!  If you haven’t ever seen it, do yourself a favor and give it a try!  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Netflix.

8. 3-Body Problem — In China in the 1960’s, young Ye Wenjie watches as her scientist father is murdered by a mob during a public “struggle session” during the Cultural Revolution.  Decades later, during the present day, Ye Wenjie’s daughter, the physicist Vera Ye, commits suicide, part of a wave of unexplained deaths of scientists worldwide.  A group of Vera Ye’s former students find themselves drawn together to investigate the mystery of what is happening to scientists across the globe, as well as the secrets of a strange new virtual reality game: 3 Body Problem.  I loved this adaptation of the wonderfully fascinating, cerebral novel by Liu Cixin!  The adaptation was overseen by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss in their first project since Game of Thrones, working with Alexander Woo.  They struck a tough-to-find balance between being, on the one, hand, very faithful to the novel, while also finding ways to incorporate more characterization by taking the novel’s central protagonist and dividing him into five original characters.  That’s a huge departure from the novel, but I love the choice, as it grounds the show in characters with interesting back-stories and different perspectives.  It also helps with some of the scientific exposition, as the characters can talk to one another about what’s happening and what they make of it all.  More importantly, I think the show’s writers did a great job at developing each of these five characters into complicated, interesting people who I enjoyed following through this adventure.  I loved the cast: Jack Rooney (Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones), Eiza González (Baby Driver,The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), Jovan Adepo (Fences, Jack Ryan, Watchmen, Babylon), Jess Hong, Alex Sharp (The Trial of the Chicago 7), Benedict Wong (The Martian, and of course he’s Wong in the MCU), Rosalind Chao (Keiko O’Brien on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones), Jonathan Pryce (Glengarry Glenn Ross, Pirates of the Caribbean, Tomorrow Never Dies, and he’s another alum from Game of Thrones, where he played the High Sparrow), and many more!  This is sophisticated speculative fiction of the best kind.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Netflix.

7. The Acolyte — This Star Wars show wasn’t perfect, but it did not deserve the awful online hatred that was directed towards it, and I’m hugely disappointed in Disney and Lucasfilm for being to cowardly to support the show and its stars and creators and cancelling it after this first season.  This show was a lot of fun to watch week to week and it did so much so well.  It explored a brand-new era in the Star Wars timeline (the “High Republic” era, about 100 years before The Phantom Menace).  It introduced an array of new characters who I LOVED (Lee Jung-jae as Master Sol, Amandla Stenberg as Osha and Mae, Dafne Keen (Logan, His Dark Materials, Deadpool & Wolverine) as Jecki, Charlie Barnett as Yord, Carrie-Ann Moss (The Matrix) as Master Indara), and it featured an incredible break-out character played by Manny Jacinto (The Good Place).  It had spectacular action, incorporating a martial arts style of fighting that was an exciting new approach for Star Wars combat.  (We get some gloriously fun and violent lightsaber fights, most notably in the fighting-filled episode five, the Wookiee Jedi fight in episode seven, and Master Sol’s confrontation with the Stranger in episode eight.)  It looked amazing, with terrific production values and incredible costumes and props and sets.  I loved that we got to visit many new alien planets and locations.  (If Star Wars never returns to Tatooine, it’ll be too soon!)  The show had the guts to make some shockingly dark story-choices (episode five is a real barn-burner, one of the most thrilling episodes of TV I’ve seen in years) and it stuck the landing at the end of the season with some grim twists that felt absolutely correct for this story (as opposed to their pulling their punches with the ending, which so many other shows would have done).  This is a terrific Star Wars show that I suspect fans will be discovering for years to come (and then lamenting, as I am now, that the story was left unfinished).  Creator and show-runner Leslye Headland (who was responsible for the marvelous Russian Doll) made something special here.   Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Disney+.

6. X-Men ’97 — This was the biggest surprise of the year for me!  I wasn’t even sure if I was going to watch X-Men ’97, and I’m so glad I did.  This was a delightful, riveting, fiercely entertaining season that just might be the best non-comic-book version of the X-Men I’ve ever seen!  I watched and enjoyed the first several seasons of the animated X-Men show back in the nineties, but even as a kid I saw the show’s flaws.  I’ve never found myself desiring to return to the world of that show.  So, wow was I blown away with how amazing this relaunch was!  They did a beautiful job balancing nostalgia with a modern approach; the character designs and animation beautifully capture the look and feel of the nineties show, but the quality of both is far higher than what we got in the original show.  More importantly, they’ve crafted stories that are emotionally rich.  I was actually moved at several moments this season — particularly in the final minutes of the show-stopping fifth episode, which made me care more about one specific X-Men character (I won’t spoil who) than I’d ever dreamed possible.  I never expected to be emotionally affected by this X-Men cartoon!!  The writing on this show was incredible.  This is still a goofy X-Men cartoon with people in colorful costumes battling it out.  But I loved how much thought and attention they gave to all the characters.  Every single X-Men character has a strong, interesting, well-thought-out character arc that plays out over the course of the season.  Even some of the villains as well!  X-Men at its best has always been a soap opera, with the characters’ personal and emotional stories being as interesting, if not more so, than the super-villain fights.  This show gets that!!  I enjoyed the way each episode stood on its own, while at the same time each episode led into the next, and the character and emotional storylines played out over the course of the entire season and built to an exciting climax in the final episodes.  Many streaming shows could learn from this approach.  Having grown up on the X-Men comics written by Chris Claremont, I was thrilled to see so many classic storylines incorporated into this season’s storytelling.  I can’t believe how much I loved this show!  It was so fun to see the vast, rich, deep, crazy world of the X-Men comics brought to animated life in such a fun and well-made way.  I can’t wait for the next season.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Disney+.

I hope you’ll come back on Thursday for part three of this list, with my TOP FIVE favorite TV series of 2024!  Thanks for reading!!

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