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.

Could they keep it going? Sure, I don’t see why not. Jake always has other stories to work. Katagiri could get pulled back in — or not, if Ken Watanabe’s contract is up. Jake and Trendy’s falling out feels like something set up with a story in mind. So does Mrs. Tozawa’s warning to Jake that she won’t forget how he failed to take Tozawa down with the surveillance tape, which it turns out she sent him. Boss Sato opens up a whole new world of storytelling possibilities. We don’t know where Sam’s headed, what she’ll do when she gets there, or what she’ll be like when she gets back. Emi unchained seems interesting to me. There’s plenty left to explore.

But if that doesn’t happen, that’s fine! Then there’s plenty left to imagine, the way we daydream futures for all kinds of characters in our favorite stories. I like the sense that the world of Tokyo Vice will keep on turning even if we’re not there to see it. Crime will still be committed, and cops and reporters will still investigate it. There will always be people eating and drinking and working and fucking behind those big glass windows. The lights of Tokyo will always stay on.

I reviewed the finale of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

To paraphrase Cosmo Kramer and Elaine Benes, it may well be unbridled enthusiasm that leads to Shinzo Tozawa’s downfall. In this penultimate episode of Tokyo Vice’s bitchin’ second season, the last yakuza boss standing seems to have it all under control, but the more he tightens his grip, the more seems to slip through his fingers. (That was a Princess Leia paraphrase, not a Seinfeld paraphrase.)

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

But as driving as Tokyo Vice’s plot can be, it’s the look and atmosphere that keeps me coming back excited week after week. Carefully composed and illuminated nighttime street scenes. Vistas of the city seen through windows behind our characters, or our characters seen through a window from somewhere high in the sky above the city. Needlessly gorgeous interior shots. Seriously, if you look at my notes on the gifs that illustrate this review, the adjectives are all effusive: “Stunning elevator shot,” “really cool hotel hallway shot,” “incredible street scene with the green phone.” Even in a show this good-looking, director Eva Sørhaug and DP Corey Walter do memorable work here.

Actors, of course, can contribute to the look and the atmosphere of a show as much as anyone. All these handsome men in tailored suits. Ansel Elgort painstakingly lighting and smoking a cigarette as Jake guts his way through his meeting with Yabuki. Rachel Keller and Show Kasamatsu getting into bed at the end of a long day, looking exhausted and beautiful. The way actors look and move and sound is as much a part of the art of filmmaking as cinematography or editing, and in this case it’s all sumptuous stuff. This suits Tokyo Vice, the most sumptuous show on television right now, to a tee.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

This installment splits its time between the Adelsteins’ in Missouri and the situation back in Tokyo. Somewhat to my surprise, the American material doesn’t feel like time wasted compared to the sumptuous unfamiliarity of the Tokyo underworld. In fact, it’s its very difference that makes it come alive. After all this time spent in the close quarters of Tokyo’s glass, concrete, and neon, seeing all those big trees, all those green lawns, all that open blue sky feels like entering another world. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Sato and Samantha are in bed together, and Sato is taking his ring off. Watching from home, I’m wondering why. Is this item of jewelry significant to him in some way — a mark of his membership in Chihara-kai, maybe? If so, I don’t remember it coming up before. Nor is it a wedding band he couldn’t bear to part with following a death or divorce, not unless there’s a whole lot about Sato we don’t know. I couldn’t quite figure out why writers Annie Julia Wyman & Joshua Kaplan and director Takeshi Fukunaga bothered to include this detail, beyond perhaps adding a little down-to-earth touch to the sex scene…until I noticed the position of Sato’s arm between Sam’s legs. He took off his ring so he could finger her without hurting her. 

I bring this up not out of prurient interest — although I firmly believe that if you’re not operating at least partially out of prurient interest, you’re not watching TV for the right reasons — but out of admiration for how Tokyo Vice handles, well, pretty much anything. For the second episode in a row, the show has served up an admirably graphic sex scene, in which the technical aspects of physical sexuality are made clear, whether that’s Trendy’s legs in the air around his boyfriend or Sato slipping off his ring before putting his fingers inside Sam. Much as I hate to give them any oxygen, there’s a vocal contingent of viewers who prefer not to watch sex scenes at all. Sex is as much a part of life as anything else going on in Tokyo Vice, and as such it belongs on screen. The show has little time for those who think otherwise, and good on the show for it.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Tokyo Vice Season 2 is a confident show. It glides from character to character, plot point to plot point, and strength to strength. Its directors know how to frame and wrap light around the characters to make them seem as vivid and memorable as the high-frequency emotional tenor of the material demands. Its sex is graphic and sexy, its violence graphic and brutal, its heroes lovable, its villains compelling. Its story has the comfortable familiarity that genre work provides, with the ability both to shock and to dig surprisingly deep that distinguishes a genre’s standouts. In a year of stiff competition (Fargo, Griselda, Sexy Beast, True Detective), it’s a crime show to remember.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

“This reminds me of The Sopranos”: Now that’s a thought you love to have. If a show is doing something reminiscent of the show that effectively made all of your subsequent favorite shows possible, then it’s doing something right. Watching a pair of gangster idiots escalate a meaningless offense into a brutal murder and clumsy coverup? That’s that Sopranos magic, baby!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Boy, this was a nice-looking episode of Tokyo Vice. Granted, this is Tokyo Vice, and looking nice is kind of its thing. But even by the show’s own neo-noirish standards, this week’s episode (“Old Law, New Twist”) had me wolf-whistling at the screen again and again. Director Josef Kubota Wladyka and cinematographer Daniel Satinoff understand that making Tokyo look like a nocturnal dreamworld is job one if this story is to succeed; whether indoors or outside, up close or from a bird’s eye view, they make the city and its people feel luminous.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

The writing is funny and clever throughout. Did you notice how the fearsome biker gang really didn’t want to leave the restaurant without paying in full? Or how Tats’s credo — “I’d rather get high, fuck girls, and steal bikes than live like [normal people]” makes him sound like the hero of a Hal Ashby movie? Or sweet and silly back-and-forth between Emi and her Korean-Japanese husband Shingo (Shoji Arai) when he calls her “a tigress” after sex and she busts his chops for sounding like “a bad romance novel”? Or the way they still have Jake carrying a backpack, used in tandem with Ansel Elgort’s floppy hair, lanky build, and goofball smile to make him look like an overgrown kid? Or even the smart and sexy way Sam wins over self-professed “confidence man” Inaba by saying her club is “a place where confidence men can come and be honest”? That stuff is good, quite good.

I reviewed the second episode of Tokyo Vice‘s two-part premiere for Decider.

As anyone who’s watched a few episodes of the original Japanese Iron Chef can tell you, 1990s Tokyo was a deliciously glamorous place — a political, financial, and cultural world capital with a sumptuous nightlife and a seedy underbelly. (Granted, you didn’t see much of the seedy underbelly on Iron Chef unless you count particularly harsh judges.) The streets, the lights, the food, the storefronts and restaurants and bars and clubs and bikes and beautiful men and women and architecture…Tokyo Vice’s great strength is showing you why this place is worth killing and dying for in the first place. 

I’m back on the Tokyo Vice beat for Decider starting with my review of this week’s premiere.

The question, I suppose, is this: Is it so bad that the show ends this way? If you were looking for a happy ending, then sure, it’s a bummer. But the counterargument, that individual virtue and skill are not enough to stem systemic injustices, is a strong one, and it’s powerfully made here. It may not be the ultimately upbeat tale of a cub reporter exposing wrongdoing that the show promised to be early on, but that may not be a bad thing in the end. After all, it’s the job of a journalist to tell the truth, and sometimes that truth is ugly indeed.

I reviewed the puzzling finale of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

“I do it despite the indifference,” says Jake Adelstein’s editor, Emi, “because somebody has to tell the truth. Someone has to build the wall of information, brick by brick, story by story, until the facts cannot be ignored, and then things have to change.” Ah, were we ever so young?

Perhaps Tokyo Vice’s greatest strength, as well as its greatest flaw, is its faith in journalism as a means of fighting corruption and criminality. It’s very hard, in the year of our Lord 2022, to look around and think that journalism has done much of anything with regards to fighting off the wolves at the door. If anything, the workaday venality and vice among the political class that journalism has exposed over the past six years has almost reached the level of white noise, easily tuned out. Always there are new horrors, and always those horrors are met with a shrug, a “wish there was something we could do, but….”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

This episode of Tokyo Vice, written by Jessica Brickman and directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka, is one of my favorites so far. It has a biting sense of humor, like when Jake approaches Tozawa’s mistress and says “One of Tozawa’s mistresses went missing because she spoke to the press—would you care to comment?” It delivers a Godfather-worthy meeting of mob bosses. It plays with lighting in a beautiful way: the dim recesses of the car in which Ishida passes his intel to Jake, the lovely blue light when Sato picks Samantha up after work, the lurid pink-red when her friend Polina gets wasted on the dime of her club-owner boyfriend, that dazzling green mirror backdrop at Samantha’s club.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

It seems like a good time to take stock of Tokyo Vice as a whole. Adelstein makes a lot more sense as a character than he did at the start, and that goes a long way. A little action never hurt a crime drama either. But there’s definitely a sense that the mystery aspect of the story is a bit too easy to suss out—seriously, who else but Kume could have been the mole inside Ishida’s organization? And certain character beats, like Jake’s phone call to his oh-so-concerned mother (Jessica Hecht), feel really paint-by-numbers.

That said, this is still a stylish crime drama in a fancy and exotic milieu, involving secretive criminal organizations, cynical cops, and idealistic reporters. These basic components are sort of hard to screw up unless you’re, like, trying really hard. It may not make for remarkable television, but watchable television? You bet. I’m looking forward to next week’s double dose of episodes, to see if it rises or sinks from here.

I reviewed episode five of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

It begins with a fantasy. As a cover of “Fly Me to the Moon” plays, as if we’re watching an old bootleg of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a resplendent Samantha descends into the high-end hostess club she’s opened. Her old coworkers preside over the place like respected courtesans. Everything is golden and gorgeous. 

Then the fantasy ends, and we find Samantha in a vacant building she plans to buy and convert into the club of her dreams. Will she get there? I’d say Tokyo Vice is ambivalent about her chances. This episode (Episode 4, “I Want It That Way”) is in large part about the gulf between what we want, and what we get.

I reviewed episode four of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

For me, the show is at its most interesting at its most granular; the details matter as much as the big picture. I enjoyed Adelstein and Samantha talking about manga. (She recommends Dragon Head and 20th Century Boys, recommendations I happily second.) I enjoyed, if that’s the right word for it, Tin Tin’s disclosure that people in Japan tend to commit suicide by fire in public so that their families won’t face legal repercussions from their landlords for damaging their apartments. I enjoyed the demure way Sato averted his gaze when Samantha tried on the dress he picked out for her, even if he immediately reneges on the gift.

I enjoyed that our first glimpse of maniac tough guy Tozawa involves a prostate exam. I enjoyed seeing Jake’s editor Emi work on murder cases in between getting berated by her Korean husband. I enjoyed the off-hand disclosure by Jake that the medical condition plaguing his kid sister was a suicide attempt. I enjoyed seeing Sato and his superior, Kume, steal a bunch of dresses right off the racks just because they could. (It reminded me of that Sopranos subplot where Tony and Christopher steal a bunch of booze off a biker gang just for shits and giggles.)

And it stands to reason that details like these stick out. If Adelstein’s mission statement means anything, it certainly means that the details matter at least as much as the big picture; without details, there wouldn’t be a big picture to begin with. Here’s hoping the show continues going down this direction when the next pair of episodes drop next week.

I reviewed the third episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Tokyo Vice has largely been sold to the world as a Michael Mann joint, but the director of Heat and Manhunter was only behind the camera for the premiere. Where does that leave us now? In a surprisingly strong place. This episode does a lot to alleviate many of the concerns I had about Ansel Elgort as the show’s leading man, and thus about the show itself. (No, not all of the concerns, obviously, not by a long shot.)

For one thing, Elgort’s character Jake Adelstein spends a lot of the episode laughing, smiling, busting the balls of his coworkers, striking up a conversation with a yakuza soldier by comparing their sneakers, riding around on a bicycle like an overgrown kid. He just seems like a much livelier, more youthful character in this outing, and it makes the story that much more believable.

I reviewed the second episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

The biggest problem facing Tokyo Vice is the matter of its leading man. I’m not even talking about the sexual abuse and misconduct allegations swirling around Ansel Elgort, although yes, that too. But even as a simple matter of casting the right man for the job, something feels off here. Elgort’s affect is too flat, his eyes too blank, his semi-permanent sneer too pronounced. You can’t exactly do “wide-eyed idealistic rookie reporter learns the ropes in a strange land’s seedy underbelly” when the actor involved couldn’t be wide-eyed to save his life. (It’s possible the show leaned away from the more traditional approach to the part on purpose, but where Elgort’s concerned it comes across more as a matter of necessity.)

It’s worth comparing and contrasting Elgort’s casting to that of Miles Teller in Nicholas Wending Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, another stylish cop thriller directed by a major talent, over on Amazon Prime Video. Teller’s character is supposed to be a dead-eyed, flat-affect sociopath, so selecting a fundamentally unlikeable actor and playing up his emptiness makes a lot of sense. (Hell, Tom Cruise has made a career out of it, including in collaboration with Michael Mann!) There’s none of that logic present in Elgort’s use in Tokyo Vice.

I’ll be covering Tokyo Vice for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.