2023-2024 Bonus Entries

(Excellent shows that started last year and ended up on a lot of 2023 lists but which didn’t air their final episodes till January 2024)

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction; based on the work of Ishirō Honda and others (Apple TV+)

The best compliment I can pay this spinoff series from the Legendary Godzilla/Kong movie series, which in quality ranges from dumb fun to just plain dumb, is this: I remember the romance better than the monsters. Actors Wyatt Russell, Mari Yamamoto, and Anders Holm capture the spark and the ache of a love triangle as well as I’ve seen it done, pretty much, with Anna Sawai providing an echo as their younger counterpart. The season finale reunion between Russell’s aged character (played as an older man by his father Kurt) and Yamamoto’s time-marooned one, scored by the Ross Brothers, is movie magic plain and simple.

Fargo

Created by Noah Hawley; based on the work of Ethan and Joel Coen (FX/Hulu)

A strong contender for the strongest overall season of Noah Hawley’s still-controversial Coen Brothers homage, this most recent entry shares many of its predecessors’ concern with the rapacious forces on the move in America today, personified by Jon Hamm’s monstrous enforcer of the patriarchy, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Its bold contention, embodied by Juno Temple’s brave battered wife Dot Lyon, is that we don’t have to swallow what they feed us.

The Curse

Created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie (Paramount+)

Like Too Old to Die Young, the first season of Them, and the Adult Swim Infomericials This House Has People in It and Unedited Footage of a Bear, this cringe-horror masterpiece feels less like a television program and more like an acute, crescendoing mental health crisis. I hated, hated, hated the pilot, which I thought was smug and self-congratulatory about the dark side of liberal do-gooding; by the end of the nightmarish and somehow prophetic finale I thought I was watching one of the best shows I’d ever seen. I was right the second time.

The Top 15 Shows of 2024

15. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Created by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay; based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (Prime Video)

Jeff Bezos is an evil man, and he prefers to keep the company of evil men these days, so I wish I could say that this show was as much an embarrassing folly this season as it was during its initial installment. Alas! Like The Wheel of Time and Foundation before it, it got gud, son. The credit is largely due to the emotionally and physically abusive relationship between Charles Edwards’s Da Vinci–like Elf genius Celebrimbor and Charlie Vickers’s gaslighting Dark Lord in sheep’s clothing, Sauron. This season made me understand why these particular guys wanted to make this particular show. I felt the purpose.

14. Presumed Innocent

Created by David E. Kelley; based on the book by Scott Turow (Apple TV+)

Clive Barker once explained that he made his monsters sexually compelling because that’s the only convincing way to write characters stupid enough to open the door that has the reader shouting “Don’t go in there!” Kelley’s adaptation of Turow’s legal thriller rightfully focuses on the explosive sexual connection between Jake Gyllenhaal’s leading man and his other woman, played in flashback by Renate Reinsve. If they make you believe in that, they can make you believe anything else. Bonus points for the insufferable antagonists muttered into life by Peter Sarsgaard and O.T. Fagbenle.

13. Tokyo Vice

Created by J. T. Rogers; based on the book by Jake Adelstein (Max)

How often do you get to say “this stylish, sumptuous crime thriller” and really mean it? But Tokyo Vice‘s second season was all that and more — an almost Dickensian (apologies to David Simon) look at the underbelly of a lost time and place. It delivered on everything the first season only promised.

12. The Old Man

Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine; based on the book by Thomas Perry (FX/Hulu)

Another sophomore outing that bettered its already pretty good first season by a substantial margin. This season’s setting in the rugged wilds of Afghanistan gave it mythic last-gunslinger gravitas. It’s a fine showcase for the formidable talents of Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow, but this was really young gun Alia Shawkat’s time to shine.

11. The Regime

Created by Will Tracy (HBO/Max)

In this sharp and subtle satire that actually looks as interesting as its dialogue reads, a mentally ill autocrat and her also mentally ill macho object of obsession plunge their country into a whirlpool of quack medicine, economic ruin, diplomatic isolation, and civil war. I dunno, it all seems funnier when Kate Winslet does it.

10. Fallout

Created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet; based on the games by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and others (Prime Video)

Though it’s one of the more egregious offenders in this year’s woeful trend of truly over-the-top teal-and-orange color grading, Fallout can be forgiven: The blue-and-yellow jumpsuits were taken right from the game, and there’s only so much you can do when you’re filming a desert wasteland against an azure sky of deepest summer. That aside, this is an unexpectedly nasty and batshit anti-capitalist/anti-American post-apocalyptic sci-fi satire from your friends at Amazon. The lead performances of Walton Goggins as a strangely sexy revenant and Ella Purnell as a pretty straightforwardly sexy fish out of water sell the whole thing.

9. Disclaimer

Created by Alfonso Cuarón; based on the book by Renée Knight (Apple TV+)

Disclaimer features arguably the year’s hottest scene and its most harrowing. It’s a sinister little dance between Cate Blanchett in glamorous Tár mode and Kevin Kline as the kind of English schoolteacher you might hear Roger Waters sing about. It’s directed with a unique eye for light and color by Alfonso Cuarón, whose work filming in the ocean feels like yet another technological feat of filmmaking in a career characterized by them. It’s not perfect, but that’s plenty for me.

8. Them

Created by Little Marvin (Prime Video)

While less brain-breakingly brutal and disturbing than its debut season, which is honestly fine with me, the second installment of Little Marvin’s horror anthology series cements returning star Deborah Ayorinde’s place in the pantheon of great horror actors. There’s a fun scary-movie feel to some of the proceedings, which makes the really bitter parts that much harder to swallow.

7. Shōgun

Created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks; based on the book by James Clavell (FX/Hulu)

Or: How I Found Out The New York Times Won’t Let You Call An Assisted Suicide Erotic. Featuring at least four of the year’s most memorable performances (Anna Sawai, Cosmo Jarvis, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano), this tragedy of manners was every bit as epic in feel as its sci-fi and fantasy counterparts. But its emphasis on restraint gave it a ruminative, romantic, melancholy tone all its own.

6. Supersex

Created by Francesca Manieri (Netflix)

A desire for sex so insatiable and profound that it takes over your whole life until there’s not much else left: This is traditionally the stuff of European art films. To my great surprise, and ultimately my benefit, it’s also the stuff of this season-length biopic of the notoriously intense Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, played by Suburra star Alessandro Borghi. Rocco’s background of poverty and savage bullying, his emotionally incestuous relationships with his mother and brother, his treatment of lust and pleasure as matters of paramount importance no matter the cost — this is livewire stuff, handled with skill, care, and artistry.

5. Sexy Beast

Created by Michael Caleo; based on the screenplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto (Paramount+)

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too: A prequel to the first in director Jonathan Glazer’s run of back-to-back-to-back-to-back movie masterpieces? Best of luck to you! But intrigue got the better of me, and boy am I glad it did. This is — realize I understand the weight of this statement — a worthy companion piece to the original film. As the young thief Gal Dove, James McArdle has incandescent romantic chemistry with Sarah Greene as his true love Deedee, and makes a believable big-brother figure to the strange and belligerent Don Logan (Emun Elliott.) But the romance is messy and complicated and unpleasant, as these things often are. Behind it all lurks Stephen Moyer as up-and-coming gangster Teddy Bass, somehow as terrifying in his way as Ian McShane was in his.

4. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)

Ryan Murphy’s empire is what it is, but you do, under these circumstances, gotta hand it to him: Between The People v. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, he’s given us probably all four of the best true-crime miniseries ever made. The story of the Menendez brothers is handled with immense respect for the gravity of the subject matter and backbreakingly frank dialogue as to its horrifying nature. Directed by Michael Uppendahl, the fifth episode, a single shot of two actors, made me sick, as well it should.

3. Interview with the Vampire

Created by Rolin Jones; based on the books by Anne Rice (AMC/AMC+)

Like the first season of The Terror did with Dan Simmon’s sprawling, detailed work of historical horror, the first season of Interview with the Vampire took everything good about its source material, jettisoned everything bad, and improved on the results in every conceivable way. For its second season, IWTV improved on its first season in every conceivable way, ending with its absolute best episode to date. That’s a fucking feat, man. This is the most drama-club goth show ever made, with all the beauty and the bloodshed that implies. With the aid of wrenchingly physical performances by all its leads, it uses the supernatural to supercharge the ecstasy of love and the agony of loss.

2. House of the Dragon

Created by George R.R. Martin and Ryan Condal; based on the books by George R.R. Martin (HBO/Max)

I believe in Westeros. Westeros has made my fortune, such as it is. And I write my reviews in the Westerosi fashion. When a show uses size, scale, spectacle, and the supernatural to convey ideas and emotions, to me it’s like a whole new kind of thing, as much an opera as a drama. These nude incestuous psychopaths flying around on their giant war-crime reptiles are, quite simply, playing my song.

1. Industry

Created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay (HBO/Max)

I can’t believe I was late to this show. I can’t believe no one told me about this show. I can’t believe no one grabbed me by the shoulders and said Sean, Sean, Sean, this is a show for you. What if Billions, Mad Men, Mr. Robot, and Girls were all the same TV series, and every episode featured sex scenes as frank and explicit as…well, I can’t think of any points of comparison, really. This show treats sex seriously, even as it depicts its rapacious young (and envious middle-aged) hypercapitalists as beautiful sociopaths, their bodies colliding against one another in the water they make their living boiling. As a bonus, you get to watch episode four, “White Mischief,” in which director Zoé Wittock takes Uncut Gems to After Hours school. It’s the year’s most invigorating hour of television, and it feels like this show slapped it down like a casually spent hundred, pulled from a bottomless pocket.

As a screen presence, Santiago needs that kind of ammo. He has to hold his own with the “big four” members of the show’s emotional quadrangle, Louis, Lestat [Sam Reid], Claudia and Armand [Assad Zaman], even though he’s not romantically or emotionally involved with any of them.

[Smiling] Is he not?

Well, well, well!

This was one of the first jobs I’ve ever done sight unseen, just because it meant working with Rolin. From the outset, Rolin called up and said, “Listen, are you OK if we don’t make Santiago queer?” I was like, “Yeah, I can sort of see it.”

But as the script started to come in, I thought the only way this level of vitriol that he has works is if he’s in love with Armand. There is this extraordinary psychological term called reaction formation, which is what Iago has for Othello. It’s a defense mechanism whereby your impulses are so unacceptable to your ego that they’re replaced by this opposite, exaggerated behavior.

Santiago finds Louis incredibly attractive. Because Armand killed Santiago’s maker — who I think he was in love with too — and also finds Louis attractive, the whole thing must be destroyed. It gave such a drive to his hatred. It was just something ruminating in myself that drove him forward in a very aggressive, mad, extreme way.

Here’s a gift link to my interview with the magnificent Ben Daniels about his delightful work as Santiago on this season of Interview with the Vampire. He was extremely gracious and generous with his time and emotion, as you’ll see. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done.

Channel Zero (2016-2018)

There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.

For Decider, I wrote about ten of my favorite horror television shows since 2016.

9. Interview With the Vampire

“Home Is Where You’re Happy” by Charles Manson

“Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.” Controversial, Daniel Molloy! The conductor of this vampire drama’s titular interview, played by Eric Bogosian, has very little patience for the bloodsucker in question, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and even less for Louis’s psychotic, pubescent protégé, the teenage vampire Claudia. It’s her Molloy compares to Manson, the cult leader who defined the death of the Age of Aquarius … and much to my everlasting surprise, it’s Manson who soundtracks the end of this episode. Molloy is right: Manson could be a talented songwriter in very limited doses, as his buoyant ode to personal freedom, “Home Is Where You’re Happy,” makes clear. It’s just hard to hear that happiness when you recall the fate of Sharon Tate, which is what makes the song a strong choice for the soundtrack of a show about magnetic mass murderers, even when they’re of the supernatural variety.

I wrote about ten of the best uses of popular music on TV this year for Vulture.

But like I said, this is the climax, and it’s okay to get a little less nuanced and more bombastic overall. Creator Rolin Jones has constructed a remarkable show regardless, one that captures the essence of Anne Rice’s work while improving upon it, for its new era and medium, with every change it makes. I don’t know what I expected of Interview with the Vampire beyond “I hope I have a good time watching the sexy vampires,” but it delivered in every way I could have wanted, and many more I didn’t know I wanted till I got them. Interview is a beautiful and sparklingly intelligent show. It’s going to be hard to wait until next year for Season 2, but I know a vampire who could tell you a thing or two about the beauty of delayed gratification.

I reviewed the season finale of Interview with the Vampire for Decider. It’s up a week early online!

The only problem with Interview with the Vampire is that at a certain point you simply run out of superlatives. Like its contemporaries Andor and House of the Dragon, IWTV provides proof week in and week out that genre television rooted in nerd-beloved source material can be as smart, incisive, surprising, and rich as any of its more traditional prestige-TV counterparts. 

I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

“I’m trying to think of something more fucked up than this.” Me too, Daniel Molloy, me too. Titled “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart” with the show’s typical baroque brio, the fifth episode of Interview with the Vampire is a troubling hour of television. It chronicles first the disintegrating sanity of the young vampire Claudia, then the traumatic event that forces her back home, then the final collapse of her surrogate family via the abusive tendencies of its miserable patriarch. It does all this while sacrificing none of the richness that has made the characters, and the show, so vivid and surprising all this time. 

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

I think that’s the key thing about this episode, written by Eleanor Burgess and directed by Keith Powell, and about the show in general. Its ability to balance the thrills and chills and sex and blood and comedy of an over-the-top Gothic vampire romance with serious observations about race, wealth, addiction, unhappy relationships, and now de facto child abuse and the misery of teenagers is hugely impressive. It manages to deliver pretty much everything you’d want from a vampire show, and more besides. And now we have four core performances that are funny and empathetic and nasty and brilliant, from Bailey Bass as well as from Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Eric Bogosian. 

Between Interview, Andor, and House of the Dragon, those of us who hunger and thirst for legitimately sophisticated nerd-genre storytelling are eating very, very well this Halloween season.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The best way I can sum up Interview with the Vampire so far is that, like House of the Dragon and Andor, it’s what I once imagined nerd cultural hegemony might be like: smart, sharp, horny, campy, and at least a little bit unpleasant and disgusting — everything you might have wanted before mighty corporate machines figured out how to produce the stuff like they produce breakfast cereal. 

I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The sense of humor brought to this fine adaptation of Anne Rice’s goth classic by showrunner Rolin Jones, writers Jonathan Ceniceroz and Dave Harris, and ace TV director Alan Taylor is undoubtedly a pleasant surprise, but it’s one of many. Simply put, this show is a cavalcade of delights, some dark and some less so. Blood and horror exist on the same plane as sex and sensuality; flashes of piercing insight into the human condition rival those into the inhuman condition; sharp commentary on race, sexuality, and even the grim toll of the pandemic is there to be found alongside jokes about eating babies. In other words, this is good, good shit.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

All in all it’s a marvelously melodramatic production. The prose of creator Rolin Jones’s script is defiantly purple. The costumes and sets are lavish and decadent. Anderson and Reid are mesmerizingly attractive, a key component of Rice’s legendarium. Director and Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor knows his way around torchlit period pieces, that’s for sure. Daniel Hart’s score is like something out of Old Hollywood. Hell, they even put ominous thunderclaps in the background during Lestat’s assault on the church and conversion of Louis into the undead. 

Of course, you have to be willing to go with all that kind of stuff to get anything out of the show. Which, I think, is a price of admission worth asking for, if not paying. Any show that’s really intent on adapting the vibe of Anne Rice’s sublimely arch, hypersensual books — even if it’s changing the time frame and, rather crucially to the story, the race of one of the protagonists — has to be willing to go there, to leave taste behind and go over the top with, well, pretty much everything. You can either stomach that sort of thing or not.

I certainly can. I’m excited to see a vampire show made with such evident craft and care, instead of the umpteenth show about teenage vampires trying to make it through Vampire High or whatever. I’m excited to see a vampire show that presents vampires as both thoroughly awful — whatever else he is, Lestat is an egomaniacal dickhead murderer — and completely irresistible once they have you in their clutches. I’m even excited to have a horror show on TV that is more about vibes than raw terror or pitch-black bleakness, one more indebted to Bram Stoker’s Dracula than 28 Days Later or Under the Skin. And I’m excited to see any show this relentlessly, bombastically horny. These are notes worth playing, and based on this performance, I’m willing to listen.

I reviewed the delightful series premiere of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.