My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2024

 

Usually, I like to introduce these lists by talking about whether it was a good year for the medium, and I tend to consume so much that I always find a way to come out on the positive end.  Well here's a first: 2024 was a bad year for TV.  I'm not ready to have a doomsday mentality about it, because I think it's mostly down to last year's strikes disrupting the release pipeline.  (Though the general trend towards shows having eight-episode seasons that come out every two years is slowly leading to worse television as well.)  I didn't have a problem creating a top 20, but it resulted in cases like my number two pick being technically the show's worst season, but it's the highest I've ever ranked the series on a year end list.

Still, I found plenty to enjoy outside of the traditional scripted Western television.  2024 was an amazing year for anime, for example, which you'll see below.  And though they can't qualify for something like this, I loved watching things like Carlos Alcaraz vs. Jannik Sinner in the Beijing tennis finals, or my favorite Street Fighter 6 player PunkDaGod finally winning EVO after years of being labelled as somebody who chokes in big moments.  Anyway, I digress -- let's talk about some of my favorite TV of the year. 

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on their episodes that aired between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.  This used to be a big thing when people watched more network shows where the seasons bled into the new year, but it doesn't factor in as much now.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2023

For the uninitiated, it's a yearly tradition for me to start this list by breaking down my relationship to television, counting how many TV shows I watched in full during the calendar year.  In 2023, I had a healthy amount of 87, so the days of watching over 100 shows in a year are long in the rearview now.  One difference here is I got so behind on TV that there were some shows I really wanted to get in under the wire that I didn't have time for.  There are always things that I miss out on, but they're usually more of a "I'm mildly intrigued to check this out" case.  This time, there are some heavy hitters that I just didn't get around to.  Hell, there was a new season of Black Mirror in 2023 and I still haven't watched it.

So now more than ever, this top 20 you're about to see is not necessarily definitive, just my favorites of what I managed to cross off my watch list.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on their episodes that aired between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.  This used to be a big thing when people watched more network shows where the seasons bled into the new year, but it doesn't factor in as much.  Although this year some shows like The Curse, For All Mankind, and Fargo are doing this annoying thing where almost all of the season aired this year but then the last two episodes are going to bleed into 2024.  That's stupid!  I hate it!

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2022

 

Alexa, play "3 Peat" by Lil Wayne.

That's right, for the third year in a row, I've accomplished the arbitrary goal I started to shoot for a few years ago of trying to watch less than 100 shows in full this year.  Although I did cut it close with 98 series, compared to 87 in 2021 and 93 in 2020, a win is a win.  I initially gave this mission to myself in order to watch less TV and focus on other interests, but even though I watched 98 shows, my relationship to television feels pretty healthy these days.  Sure, I watch alot of shows, but I waste far less time on things that are mediocre than I used to.

There wasn't much of an overarching trend to explain the TV landscape in 2022.  It was more about the continuation of narratives we've been living through for a while now, most notably the persistent dominance of a few streaming services when it comes to the content that takes up space in the market.  Although I do wonder whether that bubble is on the verge of bursting, particularly with the outrage that sparked from HBO Max's decision to remove some of their original content from the service in the past few months.

For me the theme of 2022, like all years, is that there's alot of good TV.  Let's take a look at some of those shows.

The rules: In recent years I started this thing where I had separate eligibility windows for streaming shows that dropped the whole season at once and shows whose episodes premiered weekly, but I'm dropping that because it was too confusing and most streaming services have switched to weekly releases.  Nobody reads this part anyway.  Shows are considered for this list based on their episodes that aired between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022.