Those of you who are looking at my five
best shows of 2024 will notice, shall we say, a certain correlation with the
Emmys and other end of years awards shows. What can I say? The Emmys got it
right this year.
5. Abbott
Elementary (ABC)
In its three full years on the air Abbott
Elementary has never been lower than fifth place on my top ten list. And it
would take a lot of work for it to drop out of the top ten altogether. Like all
of us I spent much of 2024 waiting for Quinta Brunson’s incredible network
comedy to come back this year (something the show nodded and winked to in its
first scene back) and basically picked up where it left off: being one of the
funniest series of the decade and arguably the most consistently brilliant
series of any genre so far.
At this point I keep thinking this show will
run out of ways to dazzle me each season and each season it keeps proving me
wrong. The Halloween episode alone was one of the most delightful I’ve seen
with Ava deciding to be Blade and completely pulling it off, and the show
paying tribute to it in the final scene of the episode in the best way possible.
(If they don’t give Janelle James an Emmy soon…)
The show continues to dive deep in so many
ways, particularly with relationships. The series is now diving somewhat more
into the families of the surrounding characters other than Janine this past
season: we’ve met Jacob’s younger brother who seemed to have a problematic
relationship with but who Jacob has spent his time misreading; we met Barbra’s
family on Mother’s Day and have been revisiting them; we met the Shamanski
family at Christmas in all of its ugly glory that rivaled the ‘Fishes’ episode
of The Bear for its level of dysfunction (though it was a lot funnier)
and we finally met, indirectly, Ava’s father played in a cameo by Keith David
that ensures we’ll be seeing him again soon.
Throw in that the show is dealing with the
possibility of gentrification along with apparently its first ever white
student as well as the realization of the Gregory-Ava relationship that remains
as adorkable as it was while they were flirting, and there is no sign that Abbott
is going to become any less of a cultural phenomena any time soon. The fact
that they are planning a crossover with another iconic blue collar series – It’s
Only Sunny in Philadelphia – makes me all the more joyful. We need laughs
more than ever this year and Abbott faculty keep delivering them.,
4. Baby
Reindeer (Netflix)
Aside
from my issues with Night Country this year’s Emmys had an incredibly
strong selection with the fifth season of Fargo, Lessons in Chemistry and
Ripley being formidable contenders. So it is a credit to the Emmys that
they absolutely made the right call when they chose to recognize Richard Gadd’s
extraordinary series for the majority of its awards.
I
have written about the show extensively for my blog as well as with my personal
connection with it on many levels. So for now I want to give credit to Gadd for
reinventing the format in a way that goes against how many limited series have
been. It is serio-comic in its tone when the majority of limited series have
always been dramatic, sometimes to the point of being heavy-handed. Each episode
was around the half-hour mark and almost never went over it, as opposed to the
lion’s share of most limited series which tend to have hour long episodes and
many will be longer than that. It is more of a roman a clef than that as Gadd,
who wrote every episode as well as starred in the role of Donny, lived through this
experience. And while a crime is involved, it is far more about a personal
journey than anything else.
Gadd
dominates every moment of the screen he is on it and deserved all of the awards
he got: for writing, directing and acting. You can see the pain Donny is suffering
when he tells every detail of his story and of the journey he has been on: how
his experiences in the past led him to look at Martha as harmless – and even
afterwards, being unable to fully let her go. He makes it clear that he and
Martha are two sides of the same coin and that the failures of the system hurt
her as much as him.
Jessica
Gunning delivered a performance that was deservedly star-making and deserved
the Emmy she received over a strong field. This included the work of Nava Mau,
who plays a transgender woman who becomes someone who Donny sees initially as
his salvation but who ends up being collateral damage for his own journey. The
fact that at the end of the series Donny seems more lost than he was at the
start is tragic as well: it’s not clear if he’s able to connect. The fact that
Gadd has managed to do so is a triumph.
Sadly,
many people eventually tracked down the real ‘Martha’ and have been harassing
her as well as the real Floyd. Those people have clearly missed the point of
Gadd’s vision though maybe that’s not a surprise either. In the world we live
in, everything is seen in a moral lens as black and white. Gadd’s vision sees
the world in the shades of grey we often refuse to. I look forward to seeing what
comes next from it.
3. The Penguin (HBO)
If HBO hadn’t moved this series from MAX to
the parent company this year I probably wouldn’t have watched it until at least
December no matter how enormous the raves were almost from the moment the
series debuted. I’ve always had issues with IP shows, particularly comic book
bases ones and no matter how much I love Colin Farrell, if it had been streaming
I’d have waited. But HBO chose to air it live. God bless them.
From the opening moments Colin Farrell
chose to turn Oz Cobb into a character we’ve been seeing throughout the era of
Prestige TV but comic books have basically not let us. He was channeling from
start to finish James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano and the writers never let up
from that image from the beginning. This was a fat, balding man with a New York
accent who had a relationship with his mother so complicated it would have stunned
Dr. Melfi when she - and the viewer –
learned the horrors of it. Diedre O’Connell was astonishing throughout as Mrs.
Cobb, the one person he cared for the most in the world suffering from a
dementia that had rotted her mind. For most of the series she seemed to be the
link to his humanity. In the final episodes we learned that she had known the
monster she had given birth to – and had let him loose into the world.
The Penguin took place in a Gotham seldom seen in the
movies or the animated series: the dirty underbelly of it, rotting from within,
the world that Batman never seems to bother with most nights because he’s
decided to beat up the Joker. That was a clear decision by the writers to show in
many ways Oz is the other side of the coin when it comes to Bruce Wayne, using
his own traumas and upbringing to build his version of himself, one where he is
the hero of his story even though he is willing to throw anyone aside in order
to obtain his vision. Like Bruce Wayne he thinks human connection is a weakness
and in the final moments we show just how much he’s willing to do to cut it
off.
Of course the breakout performance of The
Penguin and one of the great performances of 2024 was that of Cristin Milioti
as Sofia Falcone. Milioti was a revelation unlike any performance this past
year, someone who had been put in a box by her family and colleagues, framed
for a horrible crime that had put her in Arkham and spent much of the season
trying to find her own path, making alliances that worked against her, losing
everything she had in a search for revenge. Her story is the tragedy of The
Penguin because she alone clearly knew the sickening hold Gotham has on its
residence and the only solution – and it was thrust away from her out of Oz’s
climb to the cop. She doesn’t die at the end of the series but her fate is far
worse.
The Penguin is the third extraordinary limited series
in the last five years with Watchmen and Wandavision that has
shown the ability to use the formula of a comic book to tell deeper and more
fascinating stories than the subject matter. Watchmen dealt with racism,
Wandavision grief and The Penguin told the story of family: both
criminal, biological and adopted. As the comic book film has been increasingly
entering a decline in both critical response and box office The Penguin is
an argument that the best versions of these stories may be in the limited
series. The writers have said that they might tell more stories in this
universe, though they would not make a sequel to The Penguin. If they
send up that particular Bat-Signal, I’d gladly show up.
2. Hacks (HBO
Max)
Like everybody watching the Emmys this
years I was stunned when Hacks ended up upsetting The Bear, which
had already won eleven Emmys leading up to the award for Best Comedy. But I
wasn’t surprised. Just as with Deb Vance, the hard to pin down comedian at the
center of this incredible show, I knew that its hour would come sooner than anyone
might think.
In its first two seasons I ranked Hacks 3rd
on my ten best list and the fact that it is number 2 this year has nothing to
do with either the Emmy or because it became any better than it had in previous
years. Watching the incredible byplay of Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder has
become one of the greatest pleasures of my life the past few years and
justified my subscription to Max. It is the only show that I started watching
almost immediately after it dropped this year because the world created by
those incredible talents of Jen Stasky, Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs is one
that I would gladly spend more time in if I had too.
As we watched Deb try to seize the
opportunity that she had come this close to getting – becoming the first woman
in late night - we saw the unlikely love
story between Deb and Ava reach its next face. When Deb (Jean Smart in her
third consecutive Emmy winning role dumped Ava (Hannah Einbinder was robbed, I
agree with your mother) to find her own path, Ava has spent the last several
months finding success but having to go through immense therapy. She still
follows her at the cost of everything and its clear the more the two of them
are together the more they are clearly soul mates. Deb would never say as much
but she’s become a better person because of Ava – which made her betrayal in
the season finale all the more wrenching for the viewer.
Much of the story was spent watching Jimmy
(Downs finally got the Emmy nomination he deserved) and nepo baby Kayla (Megan
Stalter, stealing everything that’s not pinned down) try to find a future for
Deb in TV. This led them to unlikely
paths (we learned that Diedre Hall is Jimmy’s mom!) and saw them willing to
sacrifice the holidays to help them (a wonderful cameo by Christopher Lloyd
that was both hysterical and heartwarming). If there’s a spin-off for these two
I’d watch.
But we also saw much of Deb’s actual
family: DJ managed to find her own voice in roast of her mother (where does
Kaitlin Olson find the time to keep showing up?) and we finally met the sister
who Deb has been blaming for the end of her marriage (J. Smith Cameron knows
how to deal with family dynamics by now). The characters continue to show their
range in all sorts of ways and I could see so many different brilliant comedies
for all of them.
I’m not going to relitigate whether The
Bear is a comedy or not, although I’m pretty sure that’s a conversation Ava
would be having with Deb at some point on the show. What I do know is that Hacks
has always been funnier, deeper and more enjoyable to watch even in its
darkest moments. Christmas at the Vance home was just as tense as Carmy’s but
it was far more fun and optimistic. I can’t wait for Season 4.
1. Shogun (FX)
It
might seem anticlimactic to name the best series of 2024 the same show that broke
Game of Thrones record for most Emmys in a single season. And some (myself
included) do question whether the show can survive with two more seasons. But
none of that changes the fact that this reimagining of Shogun was by far
the most radical and daring project on television not just in 2024 but perhaps
so far this decade.
To
compare this series to the 1980s Richard Chamberlain one is a disservice: this Shogun
restores epic to the miniseries in a way that has been missing even as limited
series themselves have become increasingly magnificent over the last decade.
And that’s before you consider the risks that every aspect of the showrunners
took with their interpretation. Nearly all of the dialogue on Shogun was
subtitled: going against the cardinal rule of television that no one likes to
read the action. Perhaps it was forgiven because so much of what we saw on the
screen was epic in a scope that the Game of Thrones comparison began almost
immediately. That also does it a disservice considering the politics and
dynamics in play were as much about inner conflict and strategizing as violence and honor.
Led
by the incredible work of Hiroyuki Sanada who was more responsible than anyone
for this show seeing the light of day, we saw a struggle between feudal lords
over Japan become a battle by a man who claimed not to want power but was doing
everything in his power to play a part. We spent much of the series thinking
Toranaga was a reluctant man to complete any action, left cold by the politics
and possibly the best man for the job because he didn’t want power. By the end
we realized he was just as cruel, monstrous and uncaring as everyone else: he
just did a better job of hiding.
The
entire cast was filled with incredible and mostly unknown Japanese actors but
the star of the show was Anna Sawai as Mariko, the disgraced daughter of a
feudal lord who had spent most of her decade wanting to die but couldn’t
understand why Toranaga refused to let her. Sawai was the quiet wind of Shogun
someone who would by far have made the best ruler but was constrained by
the roles of her gender and era. In her final episode we saw a woman who was
determined to play a part Toranaga had given her but was determined to find her
own independence in her final act. Her actions strike me as the boldest of the
show and rival Cristin Milioti’s work for the best dramatic performance of
2024.
I
had little doubt the writers could return to the work of James Clavell: he had
written six books in his Asia saga, all of them the kind of bricks that Shogun
had been. Indeed they had their eye on King Rat before the show was
unexpectedly given a two season renewal. When Season 2 will comes remains to be
seen; whether it can come close to matching the majesty of this year is highly
unlikely at best. But in its triumph it did for FX what twenty years of
groundbreaking dramas, from The Shield to Damages, from Justified
to The Americans, could not accomplish: give them a triumph at the
Emmys in this category. That is a restoration of honor to an network worthy of
it.
In
the conclusion I will deal with the Grand Jury prize, acknowledging some of the
other great performers and networks in TV this year.
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