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.

Friends, I flapped my arms like an excited goose when I saw Dan and Emily reunite. This despite the fact that I already knew she was alive — they revealed it at the end of last episode and spent the first third of this one explaining how she pulled it off by killing all her Pavlovich-hired captors, duh — and that their reunion was almost certainly inevitable. I’m just that invested by this point in how much these two characters love each other. 

And why wouldn’t I be? The whole point of the show is about how their love for one another persists despite all the madness and misery. It’s the only constant in either of their lives, through multiple identities and countries and continents and allegiances. You can question whether their love for each other is healthy, you can question whether professional killers feel love the way you and I do, but you can’t question that connection between them, flawed and befouled though it may be. 

I reviewed the strong season finale of The Old Man for Decider.

It’s a grimy little circle, isn’t it? The best hope any of these people having of leading functional lives is, what, lying forever, after killing enough people to get set up safe somewhere to begin with? So that, what, someone can come crawling out of the past 40 years later to kill you or your loved ones anyway? When does it end? Sooner for some than others, I suppose. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

It’s funny: The Old Man, along with The Americans and Better Call Saul, are three of the best shows to ever do it when it comes to the craft of espionage and sabotage. But they’re also three of the quietest shows ever when it comes to the people doing the spycraft. Dan and Zoe and Carson barely raise their voices in this episode. Mike Ehrmantraut and Gus Fring and Nacho Varga rarely spoke above a low purr. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings could be explosively angry, but their jobs involved nearly as much quiet, wordless drudgery as it did honeytrapping; their unintentional Ahab, FBI Agent Stan Beeman, his partne Dennis Aderholt, and his KGB counterpart Oleg Burov talked like they worked in a library. 

Every single actor involved in the above roles (deep breath: Jeff Bridges, Amy Brenneman, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Jonathan Banks, Giancarlo Esposito, Michael Mando, Matthew Rhys, Keri Russell, Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, and Costa Ronin) deserves kudos for shying away from the high-decibel, demonstrative acting style we associate with action and adventure. Sure, the spies keep quiet when they don’t wanna get caught, but otherwise they live for the excitement, right? 

Not these guys. Whatever compels them to keep doing what they’re doing has not translated into a bonanza of excess energy for them to spend. It’s rendered them thoughtful, quiet, cautious, careful. As Zoe puts it at one point, doing this means having to be okay with never trusting anybody again. She also says that while she’s always been a person who breaks things, her experiences with Chase and Bote, the things she’s learned how to do, mean she’s now “armed.” You speak softly when every word is a weapon.

I reviewed the latest episode of The Old Man for Decider.

The question of whether Morgan Bote is Dan Chase’s father is interesting primarily insofar as it is, still, a question. Leaving the matter so up in the air, so much a question of interpretation of word choice and facial expressions and tone of voice and body language, never giving us a definitive answer or even asking the question in an explicit way…We know the truth is in there somewhere, but at the moment we have no way to get at it based on what director Ute Briesewitz, writers Jonathan E. Steinberg and Craig Silverstein, and actors Jeff Bridges, Joel Grey, Amy Brenneman, and John Lithgow (who has a reaction to it all that could be one of realization or exasperation) have chosen to show us. 

It’s like turning the Hellraiser puzzle box around in your hands, unable to figure out which panel to press to access the painful reality hidden within. It’s a lot more rewarding than the umpteenth “I am your father,” that’s for sure. The show has had two secret father reveals already; why not soft-pedal the third, if indeed it is the third at all?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

Reunited, and it feels so good. After spending the first two episodes of Season 2 apart, both sides of The Old Man’s story come together in this episode. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Shot by director Steve Boyum with an eye for thoughtful closeups, intense action, and sweeping vistas of the wilderness alike, it’s a Central Asian neo-Western par excellence.

It really does have all the hallmarks of the genre. A remote village in a rugged desert land. A capable young woman in terrible peril. Two old gunslingers taking one last ride to find her. A powerful, dangerous man in control of valuable land. A brash young bandit come to take it all. A gunfight at the gates of town. A rescue by the cavalry. A white hat turning, if not black, then at least shades of grey. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

There’s a joke in the animated series Adventure Time, where the young hero, Finn, praises the biscuits cooked by his sidekick Jake, a talking, shapeshifting dog. “Finn,” says an exasperatedly honest Jake in response, “I made those biscuits with so much butter! You were just responding to the butter!” 

This is worth thinking about when you watch TV. (Other than Adventure Time, I mean.) How often are we responding favorably to a show because all the parts work in sync to create a whole that’s more than their sum, or because we just like a bunch of the parts a lot? When are we responding to the biscuits, and when are we just responding to the butter?

—

After the first episode, I started wondering if The Old Man’s primary strength was just how enjoyable and talented veteran actors Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow are. This episode proves that Alia Shawkat is a vital ingredient, without whom The Old Man noticeably feels like half a show. 

It also shows that she, too, is a casting coup in the same way Bridges and Lithgow is: She’s simply a very interesting person to look at. Bridges has his Old Man of the Mountain visage, Lithgow his unparalleled look of officious aggrievedness, and Shawkat a prodigiously freckled canvas across which emotions as simple as rage and defiance and as complicated as grief for a life never allowed to exist are splashed like a Jackson Pollock. 

The Old Man returned last week with a two-part premiere; I reviewed episode one and episode two for Decider.

Where does that leave us, then? In the grips of an expertly made story of devotion and deceit, supported by excellent acting (I’m particularly impressed with John Lithgow’s ability to convey dismay and disbelief in seemingly dozens of different ways), played out with guns, on an international scale. And hey, did I ever mention how beautiful those medieval-style opening titles with the dogs are, by the way? The Old Man is crackerjack TV, in other words. I can’t wait for round two.

I reviewed the excellent season finale of The Old Man for Decider.

I put together a little explainer for the season finale of The Old Man, which is very good, for Decider. Full review coming soon!

[whispering to date while watching The Old Man when The Old Man first appears on the screen] That’s The Old Man

Apologies to Twitter user @vineyville, but that was the tweet that came to mind the moment John Lithgow’s Harold Harper, the simultaneously scheming and well-intention assistant director of the FBI, told Jeff Bridges’ “Dan Chase” that “the Old Man”—Joel Grey’s Morgan Bote—has his daughter, Alia Shawkat’s Angela Adams/Emily Chase. Their daughter, actually, if you want to count Angela/Emily’s close work relationship with Harold as a father-daughter thing, which both characters seem comfortable doing.

If that paragraph seems confusing, congratulations—you’re watching The Old Man! This penultimate episode of the skillful spy drama’s first season is an at-times dizzying display of conflicting loyalties, secret relationships, and sudden betrayals. Like the coded messages that Angela and Chase send to each other using secret bank accounts, it can take a lot of deciphering.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

It’s remarkable how much can happen in an episode where nothing really happens. That, at least, is the conclusion I’ve drawn from The Old Man’s fifth episode. As a matter of physical business, it’s almost profoundly uneventful: Harold Harper and Angela Adams sit on a plane and wind up in a records storage closet; Dan Chase and Zoe McDonald take a car ride to a pet hotel and a banker’s house. But within that basic framework, secrets are revealed and allegiances shift back and forth like shadows. I’m not sure how much I’m buying what they’re selling, but it’s never less than a blast to watch.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

“Keeping you alive and safe: That became my priority, Zoe,” says Dan Chase—excuse me, “Dan Chase.” He’s talking to the woman he spirited away from her own home, which had been invaded by a hitman, by secreting her in the trunk of his car. Zoe’s understandable reaction is to back away from him like a beat dog. He tells her to call her son and let him know she’s being held against her will, in a ploy to keep the Feds from considering her an accomplice. She tries to do so, but her son is screening her calls and won’t pick up.

The next thing we know, FBI Assistant Director Harold Harper is saying “Dan Chase is gone.” The phone calls we’d just seen happened three days ago. Time flies when you’re a rogue black-ops veteran on the run from the government, I guess.

It’s bold little maneuvers like this—sweeping three pivotal days aside in a breath—that make The Old Man such compelling viewing, even three full episodes removed from the pilot’s astonishing long-take fight scene. The show, and its characters, are full of surprises, and spring them on us at nearly every turn.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

It’s juicy material, all told. And if it isn’t quite as pulse-poundingly delivered as it was in The Old Man Episode 1 — Zoe’s witnessing of Chase’s battle with the assassin notwithstanding — it’s still pretty riveting stuff. Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman, Alia Shawkat: If you were wondering if a series with these leads might be entertaining to watch, wonder no fucking longer. I’m still waiting for a return to that astonishing long-take battle from the premiere, but regardless, this is a spy game worth playing.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

I’ll say this for The Old Man’s second episode: It was wise of FX to schedule it back-to-back with that bravura first episode. Many of the pilot’s strengths—the cat-and-mouse games, the bone-crunching combat, the barrage of surprises—are replaced by the (admittedly charming) relationship dynamics between Chase and Zoe on one hand and Harper and Adams on the other. And for all that the ep includes a brief monologue from Chase about a wise man who believed “the truth lived only in silence”—an echo of Harper’s Frank Lloyd Wright quote about space being “the breath of art” from the first episode—the ostentatious long takes and silences of the first episode aren’t really on display here. Aside from a lovely prolonged shot of Chase and Zoe taking and holding each other’s hands, it’s a much more standard episode of television, for whatever that’s worth.

Still, I think you’d be a fool to write off what Bridges and Lithgow and Brenneman are delivering here: thoughtful portraits of aging people by intelligent and extremely telegenic actors. I mean, I’d watch a romance about Chase and Zoe even without the CIA-killing-machine business. And I have some confidence, whether earned or not, that the show can return to the nail-biting thriller sequences of its debut if and when it wants to, especially with Harper’s assassin in play. 

What I wonder, beyond hoping for a return of the premiere’s suspense, is whether The Old Man will delve into the wisdom, or lack thereof, of America’s imperialist counteroffensive in 1980s Afghanistan. When you look at the past 20-plus years of life on this planet, it seems pretty important to get that story straight, right? As a rabid anti-communist who helped the mujahideen (until he suddenly stopped, for reasons unknown), Chase is a hard figure to valorize. Will the show try, or is the futility of what he did a part of the narrative? Whatever my reservations about this episode, I’ll be sticking around to find out.

I reviewed the second episode of The Old Man for Decider.

Take another lengthy sequence, for instance—actually, it’s not a sequence, it’s one long shot that lasts for roughly five and a half unbroken minutes. In this shot, Chase rams his car into one of his black-ops pursuer, gets out of the car and shoots the guy to death, then has a seemingly endless mixed martial arts battle against the surviving agent, until Chase’s well-trained attack dogs chase the guy back into another car for safety. Remember that teary-eyed old man from the driver’s-seat phone calls? In his place is a vicious operator who manages to kill three highly trained men half his age, and we get to observe him in action without the camera cutting away. After all the attention the show has lavished upon Chase’s age, watching him defeat his enemies—with a little help from his dogs—is borderline miraculous. And indeed, Jeff Bridge’s masterful physical performance throughout the episode makes his every impressive physical feat feel like a borderline miracle. That power from that body? It feels incredible, and totally earned.

This is the kind of gripping, self-assured action filmmaking that awaits you in The Old Man’s pilot episode, the first half of a two-episode giant-sized series premiere. Based on the book by Thomas Perry and directed by Jon Watts (late of the Spider-Man franchise) from a script by co-creators Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg, who serves as showrunner, it’s the most engaging espionage thriller debut since The Americans.

I reviewed the series premiere of The Old Man for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show.