The best shows of 2024

In keeping with 2024’s finest show, let me begin this conversation by speaking about great shows that left me… disgruntled.

The Bear, a series that turned “Yes chef” into a term of affection (both in the boardroom and the bedroom), lurched clumsily from grace in its third season, its devastating energy now tasting like microwaved misery. Bad Sisters, my top show of the last few years, had a dismal second outing as the series — previously adapted from a Belgian original, and now doing its own thing — forgot that it was a comedy, and that the titular sisters had irrepressible personalities. To me, watching a great show flail feels like a personal disappointment, like watching a favourite sportsman fall short or a nephew share an untrue WhatsApp forward.

Read the review here: ‘Baby Reindeer’ is a tough and tremendous watch

Those don’t make the cut, and these almost did. The Honourable Mentions of 2024 are: The Sympathizer (JioCinema), where Robert Downey Jr does beautifully to basically play all the white people — the joke is that all white people look alike — but Park Chan-Wook’s first series could have used tighter writing; Baby Reindeer (Netflix), that for all its compelling stickyness, felt weirdly exploitative; Say Nothing (Disney+ Hotstar), a sensitive and beautifully acted series about The Troubles in Ireland that keeps diluting its own storytelling potency — a very un-Irish thing to do.

Here, then, are the ones that got it right:

10. Only Murders In The Building (Disney+ Hotstar)

The unlikely investigative trio — Martin Short, Selena Gomez and the show’s co-creator Steve Martin — found themselves hemmed in by the premise promised by the title: that they will only investigate murders that occur in their own Manhattan building. The second and third seasons were badly plotted hit or miss efforts, but this fourth season — a deeply affectionate look at stuntmen and filmmaking — embraced the silliness with superlative cameos. An infectiously good time.

9. Nobody Wants This (Netflix)

Hallelujah, the romantic comedy is not dead. This wittily written show was so straightforward that I called it “relationship pornography" for its wishful portrayal of a Perfect Man™. Yet don’t count out old-school charm and heart. This global Netflix blockbuster proved to be just a show, standing in front of a viewer — and being obvious enough to reiterate that it is just a show — asking the viewer to love it.

Read the review here: ‘Nobody Wants This’ gives us a whole lot of romantic pornography

8. Mr & Mrs Smith (Amazon Prime Video)

In 2005, impossibly beautiful people Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt starred in a hit film of the same name, playing rival spies who happened to be married. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover are significantly more relatable — inasmuch as one can relate to on-screen spies, shooting at neighbours and enabling revolutions. Sneakily enough, this series is less about spycraft and more about modern marriages. Every relationship could use some jabs of truth-serum. 

7. Chicken Nugget (Netflix)

As unhinged as it gets. In the first few minutes of this outlandish Korean series, a young woman gets transformed into a chicken nugget — a nondescript piece of batter-fried poultry — and that leads us into a story of romance, adventure and emotion. This is the single most unpredictable series I have watched in ages, and its audacious storytelling leaps left me constantly flummoxed. What a snack.

6. We Are Lady Parts (JioCinema)

I love this smashing British series about an all-woman Muslim punk band. It’s irreverent, but more wholesome than one might expect (there is Don McLean love alongside bass-heavy songs about headscarves) and also more provocative, riffing on the problems of young South Asians caught between tradition and self-expression. The second season is as delightfully satisfying as the first, with a tremendous soundtrack that includes a wildly cool Britney Spears cover. Malala Yousafzai stops by for a cameo, and brilliantly enough, they put her atop a unicorn. Now that’s what they call music.

5. Barzakh (Zee5/YouTube)

The most ambitious series to come out of the subcontinent, Barzakh is a mystifying work of magic realism — the story of a mythical book that never existed, while the show, fittingly enough, feels like an adaptation of a novel that Marquez never wrote. An old patriarch gathers his family in an ethereal hotel for his third “and final” wedding, but the woman he is to wed died decades ago.

He believes, stubbornly, that she will appear. This surreal fable, with fairies and hallucinogens and prophecies, made me believe — and question — ghosts of my own.

Read the review here: ‘Barzakh’ review: Leagues ahead of anything on the Indian streaming scene 

4. What We Do In The Shadows (Disney+ Hotstar)

Vampires never die — which is why the very fact that What We Do In The Shadows had its final season this year seems patently unfair. Spun off from one of the funniest films of all time, Shadows consistently provided some of television’s biggest and oddest laughs over six seasons. This sixth season — one that I will write about at length soon — is bittersweet, with these bloodsucking immortals somehow coming of age. It’s a season of growth and discovery, of multiple endings and tremendous storytelling.

Damn, I miss it already. This comedy, in particular, deserved to go on and on, even past its prime. It deserved to be long in the tooth.

3. Laid (JioCinema)

It takes time for a comedy series to find its step. The greatest comedies appear shaky in early seasons, figuring out what works before going at it hard. Laid, however, comes off the starting gate sleek as a sportscar: the lines are sharp, the characters are immediately intriguing, and the jokes are wicked and quotable and prickly. It’s as fully-formed as, say, the great 30 Rock.

Laid is about a woman who learns that everyone who she has ever slept with will die. The concept sounds familiar and even overdone, but give this smart and self-aware series a whirl. It’s so sharp it hurts.

2. Shogun (Disney+ Hotstar)

James Clavell’s novel Shogun was adapted into an acclaimed television miniseries decades ago, but this new adaptation concentrates not on the white man coming to feudal Japan but on the Japanese themselves, caught between war and survival. The storytelling is spectacular yet intimate, the characters are complicated and hard to forget, and there are scenes you will not be able to shake off.

This is, quite simply, cinema.

1. Curb Your Enthusiasm (JioCinema)

Irritation may be the most universal feeling.

In 1989, Larry David brought us four selfish New Yorkers irritated by behaviour around them: Seinfeld (Netflix) was primarily about finding flaws in those we meet — in the way they speak too softly or aren’t worthy of sleeping with— and it became American television’s most enduring and most influential comedy.

The insane success of Seinfeld seemed to befuddle David, who then decided to become the subject of the joke. On Curb Your Enthusiasm, he played a bitterly misanthropic version of himself: the wealthy creator of Seinfeld who has enough money to not worry about work and instead fixate on societal conventions, on niceties that are anything but nice, and on the hypocrisies too many of us take for granted. And yet this “social assassin” was no noble crusader, but one who — with convenient double-standards — wanted the thank-you notes, wanted the credit, wanted the social bang for his buck.

The Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm is Larry David’s critique of the human race, much in the same way as — as Quentin Tarantino’s characters said in Kill Bill — the weak and indecisive Clark Kent is Superman’s critique of the human race. The show gives us an appallingly unlikable protagonist, one we are shocked by and who does things we would never do, a man we are glad is not our friend… and yet, we understand his irritation. We got it.

Also read: Farewell to ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, the show about everything

Over the years, David took potshots at everyone through this astonishing, spontaneously-performed series: at Jews and Palestinians, at pro-wrestlers and writers of Broadway musicals, at Klansmen and drinkers of organic milk, at Ayatollahs and actors. In his final series, which I wrote about earlier this year David gave the Larry David treatment to finales themselves.

Take nothing seriously. That, to me, is David’s code. Take nothing seriously and laugh at each other. As words to live by, those are pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.