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.

What will it remind me of?

“Shogun” is very much a product of the post-“Game of Thrones” television landscape: It is a high-budget medieval-esque action-adventure period piece with a high melodrama quotient. While many shows indebted to “Thrones” are fantastical — “The Wheel of Time,” “The Rings of Power,” “House of the Dragon” — “Shogun” is straight historical fiction. Its visual grandeur, however, makes it look like an epic fantasy minus the dragons.

There are other clear influences, including the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa — as Frederick E.O. Toye acknowledged in his acceptance speech for best drama directing on Sunday night. This applies not only to the show’s setting and swordplay but also to the psychological drama, scheming and tragedy.

The show’s emphasis on the roiling interior lives of its women characters, who are hemmed in by cultural and religious constraints, echoes the work of Ingmar Bergman. Lady Mariko’s desperate life, in particular, feels like “Cries and Whispers” with samurai swords.

I wrote a primer for the Shōgun-curious after last night’s Emmy Awards romp for the New York Times.

“Shogun” reactions seemed to move swiftly from “Hmm, this show sounds interesting” to “Wow, this show is really good” to “Give this woman the Emmy right now.” Were you tracking that groundswell?

It wasn’t like I was sitting in front of my computer reading everything, but there’s always going to be a part of me that’s very self-critical. Even while it was happening, I was like, But what if they don’t like the next episode? Once we hit the end, I realized, Oh, OK, people are actually happy with the Mariko they saw. She’s beautifully written, and that’s why they love it, but I probably didn’t do a horrible job.

Does the Emmy nomination confirm that for you?

It gives me confidence. I have such bad impostor syndrome, so I feel like: I’m doing OK; I can keep moving forward; I can keep doing jobs; I can keep working hard to do what they saw on “Shogun.” It just makes me want to do more. It makes me want to keep telling stories that have a big impact on the people who haven’t been seen.

I got to interview Shōgun star Anna Sawai for the New York Times again, this time focusing on her Emmy nomination for her work as Lady Mariko. This was a really fun one to do.

So in the end, it is the show’s opening credits, with the image of a frightening mask erupting from a mountainside, that have the right of it. “Shogun” is not the story of a hero charging his enemies. It’s the story of a mastermind slowly revealing himself, until a nation cowers before his countenance.

I reviewed the finale of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Finally, the lady gives up. Since she cannot obey her lord’s instructions to return to Edo with his family, she also cannot live with the offense of failing him. She will kill herself at sunset, she announces. Since Mariko is Christian, this is a mortal sin, unless she can find a second willing to deliver the death blow. It’s a grim honor — one that the Christian regent Lord Kiyama (Hiromoto Ida) refuses, despite his own beliefs. The lords are not yet ready to make a public break with Ishida and Ochiba, whose control of the Heir gives her incredible power.

But Mariko’s resolve gives her power of her own — a terrible sort of power. When Kiyama fails to show up at the ceremony to serve as her second, her ultimate reward for all this suffering seems to be the damnation of her immortal soul.

It’s all too much for Blackthorne to take. Grabbing a sword, he takes his place by her side, preparing the fatal stroke that will slice off her head after she thrusts a blade into her belly.

Ironically, this is one of the show’s most intensely romantic moments. Such is Blackthorne’s love for Mariko that he is willing to kill her in order to grant her death the honor she believes it will hold. Mariko believes she is damning herself to hell for eternity. Whether he also believes this is immaterial. He simply cannot allow her to experience that anguish in her last moments. He cannot let her die alone and afraid.

This fleeting but real emotional intimacy, profound beyond words, is conveyed by Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai with minimal speech and movement. It’s all shown with their eyes.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

What attracted Lady Mariko to Catholicism?

That was one thing I was really trying to understand. I didn’t know how you could be Catholic and a samurai, because they feel so opposite. But it’s not because Mariko believes in the power of the religion, or the money, or the politics. She wasn’t interested in any of that. It was more that the Catholic priest reached his hand out when she really needed something to hold onto. It could have been anything, but it happened to be that. She found light where she couldn’t see any.

I interviewed Anna Sawai, star of Shōgun (and Monarch and Pachinko), for the New York Times.

The ritual of seppuku has been described and threatened by multiple characters since episode 1, but it isn’t until this point that “Shogun” finally depicts the act in graphic, agonizing detail. Indeed, Hiromatsu’s death scene functions as a microcosm of the whole series: teasing us with the taboo thrill of violence, then really making it hurt when it sinks the knife in.

The good-hearted Hiromatsu is the canvas on which the sound and effects team paint a grotesque portrait of metal tearing through flesh and muscle and viscera, until the sword of his son Buntaro, who Hiromatsu has asked to “second” the act, severs his head. It rolls directly toward Toranaga, like a grotesque accusation.

Here’s your code of honor, the show seems to say. Choke on it.

I reviewed this week’s Shōgun for the New York Times.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Few cinematic genres have had as fruitful a conversation with one another as the samurai film and the western, so it’s only fitting to use an epigraph from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to sum up the central conflict in this week’s episode.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

But this excellent episode has more going on than crucial back stories and thrilling war councils. It also contains the show’s sexiest, most romantic material to date. The writer Maegan Houang realizes that the concept of the eightfold fence, retaining hidden spaces for your true emotions while erecting barriers to obscure them, as emphasized in feudal Japan, is a gigantic gift for developing romantic tension between two characters.

Blackthorne’s visit to the brothel known as the Willow World, with Mariko acting as his translator, is presaged by an earlier scene. Passing through his house, Blackthorne overhears Mariko praying in Latin. He kneels down on the other side of the thin wall and begins reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Each can hear the other. Each understands that the other is communing with God, an incredibly intimate act. They share intimacy without impropriety.

Things get even more achingly romantic at the brothel. The pair are there on the orders of Lord Toranaga, who wants to reward Blackthorne for saving his life, and to compensate him for having endured the uncivil behavior of Mariko’s husband, Buntaro. Toranaga is also wise to the fact that there’s something going on between the Anjin and the Lady. Commanding her to serve as Blackthorne’s translator in a brothel may simply be a way to give them license to get naked in a private location together — although “private” is a relative term when even the sex workers are spies.

The lucky lady at the Willow World is Kiku. Girlfriend of the ambitious, jealous young Lord Omi, nephew of Yabushige, who is none too thrilled she will ply her trade with a barbarian. Kiku is acclaimed as the best courtesan in the region, and turns out to be a hell of a wing woman, too. Her erotic words about the pleasure and escape she can provide with her body are relayed to Blackthorne in Mariko’s voice, and the desire in that voice, as well as Blackthorne’s desire in hearing it, is unmistakable.

Though Kiku all but invites the two of them to make love, they know their every word and gesture are being scrutinized. Blackthorne follows Kiku to their bedchamber while Mariko insists on staying behind — but not before he brushes her hand with his own. I’m surprised no one’s kimono caught fire from the sparks that flew with that touch.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun, a show I’m looking forward to watching more and more, for the New York Times.

By now, all Blackthorne wants to do is take his ship and his crew and go home. He feels he’s upheld his end of his deal with Toranaga. But following that punishing conversation with Lady Mariko, she refuses to translate accurately for him anymore, and his pleas go unheeded.

But John Blackthorne has a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. His shipwreck on the shores of Japan placed him in grave danger, but it was also what gave him the chance to alert Lord Toranaga, the closest thing Japan has to a ruler, to the perfidy of his Portuguese allies. He winds up a prisoner, but his imprisonment allows Toranaga to delay, and then escape, his impeachment and execution.

Now, just moments after Mariko sabotages his request to leave, he bears witness to an earthquake and a landslide — the kind of natural disaster that horrified him when Mariko first told him about such occurrences.

The landslide gives Blackthorne the opportunity to spring into action, find Lord Toranaga buried beneath the dirt and help drag the man to safety. The Anjin slaps Toranaga on the back a few times until he coughs up the last of the dirt blocking his airway, and then gives Toranaga the swords gifted to him earlier by Lady Fuji, an act just as impressive to this audience in its way. Once again, by finding himself in a jam, Blackthorne is also perfectly positioned to prove his worth to the man on whom his life depends. He is the luckiest unlucky man on television.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

But Blackthorne’s decency toward Fuji clearly impresses Mariko. So does his naked body, of which she gets an eyeful when she stumbles upon him preparing to bathe in a hot spring. There they sit back to back, and using increasingly tender, sensual dialogue, he walks her through what it might be like to spend an evening in London as his guest. In part he’s joshing her, saying he’d take her right to the queen. But he’s not kidding about going to the theater and enjoying a good tragedy, just as she does. And his near-poetic reverie about walking along the Thames seems to transport her right there.

Yet it might be his praise of her fortitude that truly plants the seeds. When you look at a house that’s been knocked down and rebuilt by one of Japan’s natural disasters, he explains, you don’t see the ruins, you see the house. Whatever happened to ruin Mariko’s life in the past, including the recent death of her husband, she has managed to rebuild herself. The two face away from each other throughout the conversation so that solely words bridge the distance between them. Through this arrangement, the writer Emily Yoshida and the director Frederick Toye paradoxically heighten the sense that the characters are closer than ever.

I reviewed last night’s very good episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Despite all its hallmarks of a real nail-biter — an escape in disguise, a firefight in a forest, a heroic last stand, a race at sea — this episode fails as action filmmaking.

The director Charlotte Brandstrom, late of the tepid fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” chronicles various exciting things going on. Ishido, Toranaga and the Christian forces fight a three-way battle in a forest by firelight. Buntaro makes his brave stand against dozens of goons on the dock. Blackthorne races against his foul-mouthed Catholic frenemy Rodrigues as they steer their ships into and out of danger. All of these incidents seem, on paper, to be the stuff of crackerjack action filmmaking.

Unfortunately, pointing a camera at action, while necessary for action filmmaking, is not the only criterion for success. Too much of the nominal excitement is filmed at a remove — medium-wide shots that neither give the full lay of the land nor immerse viewers in the physicality of combat. There’s no actual surprise in the surprise attack in the forest, no attempt made to root us in the experiences of the besieged, no fight choreography that communicates the peril of battling two enemy forces at once, as Toranaga, Blackthorne and the surprisingly well-trained Mariko do.

You don’t feel the arrows whizzing by, the way you do in, say, the battle scenes in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films. You don’t feel the chaos of that nighttime battle. You don’t feel Buntaro’s blend of desperation and terrifying skill as he holds at bay a dock full of assailants. You don’t feel the risk of that game of chicken Blackthorne and Rodrigues are playing, not when your primary view is two guys with their hands on the rudder. You don’t feel much of anything.

The lighting is a persistent problem in this regard. Both the blue-gray of the nighttime scenes and the blinding haze of daytime at sea make the show feel not so much surreal as unreal, like action taking place in a digital no-man’s-land.

I reviewed last night’s mixed Shōgun for the New York Times.

Of the two episodes in this initial offering, the former is by far the weaker. For one thing, it falls victim to a bad case of first episode syndrome: a tendency to front-load shows with attention-grabbing material that is much blunter and broader than what follows. (I always think of “Billions,” which opened with a bound and gagged Paul Giamatti being used as a human ashtray and toilet.)

Here, the voyeurism and torture had something of the air of “This ain’t your average samurai story”; the very expensive but rather staid look of the series, with all the usual medieval peasant grime and aristocratic splendor, gives lie to that claim, at least visually. At any rate, when you’re killing babies in side plots and boiling men alive onscreen in your very first outing, where do you go from there?

You go in an entirely different direction, as it turns out. It’s not that the second episode lacks for spectacle: the murderous rescue of Blackthorne by Yabushige’s “bandits,” and the genuinely shocking rampage of a maid-turned-assassin through Toranaga’s quarters on the hunt for Blackthorne, provide plenty. What does the trick is exposition, of all things. The multiple scenes in which characters are given the lay of the land — Father Martin and Blackthorne explaining to Toranaga their nations’ conflict; a Franciscan prisoner describing Toranaga’s rivals to Blackthorne; Blackthorne outlining the Spanish/Portuguese conspiracy for world domination to the court — may be inelegant, but they sure are engaging.

These expository dialogues add much-needed density to the comparatively airy first episode. Suddenly, a straightforward adventure story about a cool lord and a fish out of water is a complex latticework of countries, religions, underlings, rivalries, assassinations, alliances and conspiracies — all on top of the basic culture clash that drives Blackthorne’s narrative. Threats can come at any character from any direction. Simply staying alive requires both Blackthorne and Toranaga to bob and weave like they’re making their way through razor wire, and one wrong move will slice them to ribbons.

I reviewed the double series premiere of Shōgun for the New York Times.