Josh’s Favorite TV series of 2024 — Part Three!

Thanks for reading my list of my favorite TV series of 2024!  Click here for part one, and click here for part two.

And now, without further ado or delay, here are my five favorite TV series of 2024:

5. The Bear season 3 — This intense look at the men and women working in the kitchen of a small Chicago restaurant remained an absolute delight for me in season three.  The show could be heart-wrenching one moment and then very funny the next.  Creator Christopher Storer has done a magnificent job creating a wonderfully lovable, and deeply flawed, set of main characters and completely hooking me into their journeys.  Many of my friends and family who watch The Bear complained to me about season three.  Nothing happened!  None of the characters made progress.  It’s just wheel-spinning!  Ha, maybe, but what glorious wheel-spinning it was!!  It’s true that I was rooting for many of the show’s characters (particularly Carmy) to demonstrate more growth and make better decisions.  But the beautiful humanity of these flawed characters, who often don’t grow and don’t make the best decisions, is what this show is all about!!  (And for anyone who says these characters don’t grow and change, just look at Richie!!  I found him hateful and endlessly frustrating in season one; now he’s easily my favorite character and the one I’m most desperately rooting for to find some success and happiness.)  Yes, this season was an exploration of characters spinning their wheels, characters who feel stuck.  But what a beautiful exploration it was!  I loved every second of it.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Hulu.

4. True Detective: Night Country — I’ve enjoyed all three seasons of True Detective, and so it was a pleasure to see the show return this year with an amazing new season, one that is completely stand-alone and not reliant on continuity with the previous seasons.  Creator and writer/director Issa López has crafted something very special here with this spectacular six-episode crime story.  The show is set in the snow-swept town of Ennis Alaska, a town where, once a year, the sun sets and doesn’t rise again for weeks.  On the last day of sunlight, a team of scientists vanish from an arctic research station.  The local police chief is Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), who winds up paired in her investigation with trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), an Alaska Native (Iñupiaq) who becomes convinced that this case is connected to one from six years ago: the brutal murder of Annie Kowtok, an Iñupiaq woman who was killed after protesting against a local mine (run by a corporation that employs most of the townsfolk).  Holy cow was this show terrific; tense and twisty.  Jodie Foster and Kali Reis were both remarkable as the two leads; each turned in a powerhouse of a performance.  I appreciated the the show’s exploration of indigenous culture, specifically the Iñupiat, who are a real community in Alaska.  I loved the way we gradually got to know many of the characters in Ennis and slowly peel back the layers of the various traumas they’d each suffered, to see how it all connected.  A compelling mystery combined with nuanced character arcs made for an amazing show.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on MAX.  True Detective: Night Country is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

3. The Penguin — Colin Farrell’s performance as Oz Cobb, the Penguin, was a standout in Matt Reaves’s 2022 film The Batman, but I was not expecting this spin-off show to be such a stone cold masterpiece!  In my wildest dreams I never expected to love this show as much as I do.  It starts off solid but unremarkable; after watching the first episode, I thought this was an interesting crime story, which was a cool take on a Batman villain TV show.  But the show just gets better and better with each episode.  It’s riveting, exciting, emotionally complex, and deeply satisfying.  I applaud show-runner Lauren LeFranc for what she accomplished here!  Colin Farrell takes what worked in The Batman and elevates it even beyond what we saw in that film, creating a richly layered character.  The show hooks us into rooting for Oz to overcome the mountain of obstacles and enemies stacked against him, while never losing sight of the fact that he is a villain.  (I applaud Ms. LeFranc & co. for having the guts to stick the landing with the dark ending this series needed.)  This show is called The Penguin, but it belongs equally to its main antagonist: Sofia Falcone/Gigante, played extraordinarily by Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother, Palm Springs).  This is a staggering performance by Ms. Milioti, bringing to life a compellingly written character.  As the show peels back the layers of Sofia’s character and history, we realize that her story is horrifyingly tragic.  And, at the same time, as we develop more and more empathy for Sofia as the episodes progress, the character gets more and more twisted, and the tragedy just builds and builds.  I won’t spoil the ending here, but I’ll just say that, as was the case with Oz’s story, I was blown away by the storytelling choices Ms. LeFranc and her team made, and I found the resolution of Sofia’s story to be deeply satisfying and heartbreaking.  And I haven’t even mentioned yet the incredible work by Carmen Ejogo (Goodrich), Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes, Kick-Ass, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Kingsman: The Secret Service), Clancy Brown (Highlander, The Shawshank Redemption, Lost, Superman: The Animated Series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars: Rebels), Mark Kelley (Jack Ryan), Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog, The Expanse, Star Trek: Beyond), Michael Zegen (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Theo Rossi (Luke Cage), François Chau (Lost, The Tick), Emily Meade (The Deuce), and so many more!  I was blown away by how much I loved this show.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on MAX.  The Penguin is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

2. Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 — When Lower Decks launched, I was dubious about the idea of a Star Trek animated half-hour comedy.  But creator and show-runner Mike McMahan created a show that turned out to have everything I wanted in a Star Trek show.  While most other modern Trek shows seemed ignorant of Star Trek continuity (if not outright dismissive and disdainful of it), Lower Decks was dripping in a pure love of Star Trek right from the first episode.  The show was delightfully accurate to the look and feel of the other 24th century Star Trek shows (Next Gen, DS9, and Voyager) in whose time-period it was set.  And the dialogue and (absolutely gorgeous) animation was chock-full of deep-cut references to all sorts of obscure Trek lore that thrilled me to no end.  The show didn’t just reference old Star Trek, it blazed new paths with new Star Trek stories, expanding the universe of Star Trek, adding lots of new characters and planets and concepts, while also digging deep and exploring many pre-existing Trek concepts and alien races (such as the Orions, who got more development on Lower Decks than on any previous Trek show).  Most importantly, the show did a delightful job developing and exploring the characters.  I love the Lower Deck characters!  Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Boimler (Jack Quaid), Tendi (Noël Wells), and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) are now some of my favorite Star Trek characters ever!!  This is what happens in any great TV show — we grow to know and love the characters and look forward to spending time with them each week.  Beyond just the four main Lower Decks characters (five now, with the inclusion of the Vulcan T’Lyn, played by Gabrielle Ruiz), the show also explored all of the Ceritos’ main command crew (who would have been the stars of any other Trek show), and then beyond even them developed a rich bench of supporting characters (just like great shows from DS9 to The Simpsons have done).  The show was also very, very funny!!  I laughed a lot, watching every episode of this show!  Thankfully, this wasn’t a parody.  The show wasn’t laughing AT Star Trek.  No, the writers skillfully found jokes in a natural way from within the Star Trek universe, and from the characters and the situations in which they found themselves.  I wish the show had been allowed to run for seven seasons as Mike McMahan had envisioned, but I’m thankful for the five seasons we got, and there’s no question that the show went out at the absolute top of its creative game.  Each of the ten new episodes here in season five were magnificent — fun and funny and filled with character and heart and a love for the Star Trek universe.  I loved every one of these episodes, and I already miss this show so much.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch in now on Paramount+.  Lower Decks is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

1. Shrinking season 2 — I seriously considered naming either The Penguin or Lower Decks as my number one show of 2024.  But in the end, it was an easy choice to settle on this wonderful, poignant, super-funny show that I so deeply love.  Shrinking beautifully balances hilarious comedy with a rich, nuanced exploration of the emotional lives of its characters.  While there are plenty of tough dramatic moments for the characters, the show retains its warm, humanistic, and optimistic tone that I found so endearing about the first season (as well as many of the other shows, such as Scrubs and Ted Lasso, overseen by Bill Lawrence, who co-created Shrinking along with Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein).  One of my favorite aspects of this show is how much fun it is to watch these characters just hanging out together!  Even though, narratively, one might think these characters shouldn’t have a reason to like one another or even to interact at all (for example, Gabby and Liz, who started off the first season hating one another but ended up as BFFs), the show was always able to mine gold both comedic and emotional from allowing the audience to watch these people bond and hang out and support one another.  The show leaned into that aspect here in season two, and it paid off extremely well.  Almost any time the show allowed a group of characters to hang out together — in Jimmy’s kitchen, in Liz & Derek’s backyard, in the staff room/kitchen at Jimmy/Paul/Gabby’s office, etc. — great stuff would happen.  Harrison Ford delivers his best performance in decades, perfectly utilizing his famously gruff and impatient persona for laughs, while also delivering riveting emotion.  I love every character on this show, and every character went on a compelling emotional journey this season: Jimmy (Jason Segel), Paul (Harrison Ford), Alice (Lukita Maxwell), Gabby (Jessica Williams), Sean (Luke Tennie), Brian (Michael Urie), Liz (Christa Miller), even Derek (Ted McGinley), my stealth favorite character on the show!  Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent on Ted Lasso) joined the cast this season and gave a very moving performance.  And there are so many other great characters on the show I haven’t even mentioned!!  (Hi Damon Wayans Jr. as Derrick #2!!)  I love spending time with these characters, and I can’t wait to see what’s next for them all.  Click here to read my full review.  Click here to watch it now on Apple TV+.

What a great year of TV and movies!!  Thanks for reading my lists!

I’ll be back soon with my list of my favorite comic books and graphic novels of 2024, and then LOTS of new reviews of movies and TV shows!  Thanks for being here!!

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• Purchasing a copy of my latest comic book, The Beast and the Booth, an all-ages Sukkot monster story!
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