January
The Curse – Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie (Showtime)
At the end of the day, I think this show might be pretty darn good and maybe even occasionally great. Which comes as a huge surprise to me! From the start, I was skeptical of this project. Did the show have anything to do besides making viewers incredibly uncomfortable? Was this all an experiment or joke that only Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone, and Benny Safdie were in on? In all honesty, it was only over the final two episodes or so that I became convinced the show did have something meaningful to say. Now, what is that message? Your guess is as good as mine. A commentary on whether charity or goodwill is ever altruistic? An indictment on the concept of “comfort” or “feel good” media in a nation that’s rooted in theft and embattled by inequality? A haunting portrayal of the world’s worst marriage? And look, if you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m something of a stickler for how series conclude. After investing so much time in something, I want to know that there’s a clear and deliberate message that ties it all together. The Curse takes another path. Its finale only opens more questions about this story and universe. What it does do is create a situation that I have never seen before in the history of anything. That in itself, makes the series worth it.
Only Murders in the Building (Season 3) – Steve Martin & John Hoffman (Hulu)*
I feel like based on its broad appeal or maybe the age of its stars, I always forget how good and how funny Only Murders is between seasons. This show is fantastic! Steve Martin and Martin Short are two of the funniest people on the planet. And here they have a show with endless guest stars and a big budget and guess what, it’s fantastic. I shouldn’t have put off Season 3 for as long as I did. If I had watched enough shows to have compiled a “Best Of” for that year, this would have made it. What’s more, the way this season ended (with a promise of yet another murder and season) delighted me to no end. I hope they keep making this show forever.
*Aired 2023
February
How To with John Wilson (Season 3) – John Wilson (Max)*
I know I say this about a lot of series (I Think You Should Leave, White Lotus, etc.), but John Wilson may have consistently been my favorite series to watch over the past three years. I didn’t expect to be so bummed out to find out it is ending. And of course, following the lead of show producer Nathan Fielder, this series spends its final season getting increasingly existential. Does part of me wish that the series would have stuck to the script of the first two seasons? Does all of me wish this series would go on forever? Yes. But How to…is unlike anything I had seen before so it only makes sense that John Wilson will keep being ambitious and trying new things. I can’t wait to see what the next project is.
*Aired 2023
True Detective: Night Country -Issa López (Max)
I feel like I’m too exhausted by the discourse around this season to really engage it it but, alas, the blog must go on! The first three episodes of this season are really, really good. The show did a masterful job at setting up a unique world with intriguing characters and a great mystery. That’s nothing to sneeze at. If more shows could start off with as good a hook as Night Country we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. So what’s the conversation anyways? Well, the final three episodes of the season were a major letdown and I’d argue pretty bad television. Now, an inherent problem of every mystery show is that the truth will undoubtedly be less exciting than the myriad of possibilities hinted at in the beginning. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. My favorite parts of the season were speculating wildly on the potential connections to the Dyatlov Pass incident or the Inuit goddess, Sedna. That being said, the show’s ultimate problem wasn’t simply that the ending was unsatisfying. While that was certainly part of it, the major issue is that in an attempt to garner increased drama, the series added way more elements than it could handle. Instead of just having one supernatural mystery to solve, by the end of the series we had three (Wheeler, Annie K, and the scientists). That’s not to mention story arcs including one character murdering his own father and weathering his own troubled marriage as well as another losing her sister to a perplexingly conflated combination of the spirit world and mental illness and then perhaps taking her own life. Oh! And we have corporate cover-ups that may extend to state and federal agencies? It was just way, way too much and unfortunately leaves a stain on a show that, if simplified, had the production value, ambition, vision, and star power to be really successful.
March
3 Body Problem (Season 1) – David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Alexander Woo (Netflix)
This show was probably always going to become a lightning rod based on its creators. What’s interesting or perhaps frustrating about this series is that it shows two things can be true at once. This series is often brilliant. Once again Benioff and Weiss do a remarkable job in bringing the viewer into a world and series that many have thought was unadaptable. At times, it has some of the best sci-fi filmmaking I have seen. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve seen a series set up grand mysteries in as exciting a fashion since Lost. And yet, especially toward its end, this first season can be maddening. The plot of the season is so condensed that by the last few episodes almost every decision and solution feels nonsensical. What’s more, just as in Game of Thrones, the series seems to lose focus on its human element (no pun intended) as it looks to continually push us further and further ahead. In any case, I still mostly admire the series and am looking forward to Season 2. How many people will ultimately stick around for that ride, however, remains to be seen.
April
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 12) – Larry David (HBO)
In 2010 I was gifted the Season 1 DVD boxset of Curb Your Enthusiasm by my dear friend Jake Viola. At that point, I was already quite late to the party as roughly seven of the show’s seasons had already aired. In fact, I’m not sure that at any point in my Curb fandom I knew for sure that another season of this series was coming (Larry had famously already tried to end the show in Season 5 and every new iteration of the series felt like it could be the last). That my man LD managed to stretch this series out for fourteen more years and five additional seasons is nothing short of a TV miracle. I started watching this show (way late) when I was 18 and it has only now concluded as I am 32. In that time almost nothing about me and maybe the world has remained the same except for finding Larry David to be the funniest person on the planet. No matter how Season 12 went down it was going to get a glowing review here because that’s how much joy I find just in this show being on the air. That Season 12 was this much of a delight is more than anyone could have possibly asked for. Thank you, Larry David.
Avatar: The Last Airbender – Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko (Nickelodeon)*
Every bit of platitude and praise you have heard for this series is beyond deserved. Avatar started airing at just about the time when I had stopped watching “kids shows” and so, despite what I consistently heard about it, I never took time to consider it. What a mistake! Alas, if there’s a silver lining, it appears to me that, anecdotally at least, the launch of Netflix’s live-action adaption this year has convinced many people to start with or revisit the original source material.
As you can plainly see, there’s not enough praise I can heap upon the show. Its world-building is spectacular and deeply imagined. The heart of the show, as is the case with any brilliant piece of art, lies in its portrayal of beautiful, complicated, and fully realized characters. But perhaps the series’ greatest legacy is its mastery of storytelling. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that the arc of this story is as good as some of my favorite fantasy stories ever. There is, I’m beginning to think, a beautiful overlap between Avatar and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series as simply told stories, originally intended for children, that are so impeccably executed and wildly imaginative that they transcend the bounds of any genre or age distinction.
*Aired 2005-2008
Survivor (Season 29) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)*
Gioia and I are burning down some old Survivor seasons. While Survivor is pretty clearly to me the best reality/game show invented, there’s not a whole lot of wisdom I can offer on each individual season. That being said, Season 29 aka Blood vs. Water is one of the best. Has three all time players in Nat, Keith, and Jeremy.
*Aired 2014
Shōgun – Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks (FX on Hulu)
Already, this has risen way toward the top of my favorite limited series ever. Granted I have not read the novel yet, but across the board this strikes me as a masterclass in adaptation. The sets, the costumes, and even the performances brilliantly set this series in a specific (and foreign to me) time and place: early 17th Century Japan. The Game of Thrones comparisons are inevitable and often Shōgun did remind me of the best parts of that series. And yet, I must admire above all else the narrative restraint Shōgun exercises throughout its duration. The story and the plot are endlessly compelling and yet the writers never let that get in the way of character development. Some may look at this series and note with derision how it’s a war story without any major battle scenes. That, of course, comes down to budgeting and the fact that this is an FX miniseries and not a film. Even so, I find the way that Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks are able to tell this story through character and not grand spectacle to be really commendable. In a year in which the biggest shows so far have been a bit of a mixed bag, it was really refreshing to have something that was truly great. To this point it is easily my favorite show of 2024.
Survivor (Season 19) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)*
The Russell season. Granted I have roughly 20 seasons left to catch up on but to me, this is easily the all-time worst jury decision. This is to take nothing away from Natalie. I think she plays a great game and is certainly a deserving winner. But it’s just brutal to watch this jury excoriate Russell’s gameplay when so many of them were happy to go along with it up until they got voted out. Was Russell an ass and probably incredibly frustrating to deal with? Sure! But he also went to and survived every single tribal council but one, dictated the vote in every one of them, independently found three hidden immunity idols, and won the final immunity challenge to clinch going to the end. What else could you want? Well, according to this jury back in 2009, they wanted a nice guy. What can you do?
*Aired 2009
Baby Reindeer – Richard Gadd (Netflix)
I’ve been sitting on this show for over a week and can safely say that I have not reconciled how I feel about it. Honestly, it’s pretty fitting given that when I watched the series (or rather inhaled it) I had wildly different responses to what I was seeing. For the first half of the series or so, I was pretty firmly against the premise of this show. For one, I thought Richard Gadd’s depiction of himself was too scathing to be redeemable (a testament to him and the series in retrospect). I was also super hung up on the “This is a true story” disclaimer that’s presented at the very start of the show. In these early episodes, Gadd would time and again narrate his actions by saying that he couldn’t really explain what he was doing. To me, it felt like a cop-out. The only evidence the series could provide us with to explain these wild and horrific actions was to shrug and say, “well it’s a true story”? It just didn’t add up for me.
And yet, my feelings changed drastically in the second half of this show. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that the later episodes of this series answer both questions I had: Whether Gadd (or Donny) is a redeemable protagonist and whether there is any more insight into his seemingly inexplicable actions. In fact, having now completed the series, I find Dunn’s narrative restraint in withholding this information until the right moment to be one of the more impressive storytelling decisions I’ve seen in a while. To the point where by the end of the series, I thought that Baby Reindeer was not only incredibly brave but on the whole extraordinarily successful.
And then…I just had to go to the internet. Let that be a lesson to you, online reader. As it turns out, adapting something like this from real life is a rather sticky subject with all sorts of ethical dilemmas baked in. Let me also remind you that the show begins quite declaratively, “This is a true story” not “This is based on a true story” or “Based on real events”, etc. And so, I feel a bit gross in learning that some events may not have happened exactly as depicted. Contrarily, I feel this same unease in learning that some of the details given were so specific that they essentially ousted the real-life identity of Martha, the dangerous and mentally ill stalker at the center of this story. What’s more, the viewer must even reconcile how they feel about Gadd creating and performing in this very series; a feat that transforms Baby Reindeer from simply being a true story into a living piece of art in which Gadd is very publicly processing his own trauma.
If you haven’t guessed by now, this all goes way beyond my ability as a blogger to grade this series simply as good or bad and I think doing so would actually be a disservice to the show. Baby Reindeer is incredibly compelling, often harrowing, and quite affecting. Does that all add up to a series worth watching? For me, it did. For anyone else, that answer is going to be deeply personal.
May
Survivor (Season 46) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)
Wow! Truly one of the more chaotic seasons of the show that I can remember. At first, I was largely skeptical of this cast. I can’t remember the last time I disliked so many people from the start. As it turned out, all of those divisive personalities really helped buoy the season post-merge. It turned out to essentially be all big egos and big villains which made following someone like Liz slightly more tolerable. The lasting memory I’ll have of the season is Maria not voting for Charlie at the end. It doesn’t make Kenzie any less deserving as winner, just a real tough beat for Charlie.
Survivor (Season 28) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)
Brains vs. Brawn vs. Beauty. Most memorable, I think, for Tony’s individual dominance and the Brain tribe’s collective struggles. Overall, this is a very good season with a loaded top half of the cast. It’s no surprise that so many go on to be repeat players (many returning in the same seasons).
June
Survivor (Season 16) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)
One of the very best seasons of the show with probably the most memorable moment in the series’ history. As far as I can remember, this is also a rare instance in which the all-women’s alliance is not only real, but wildly successful.
Survivor (Season 1) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)
I was both wary and excited to watch this season. Excited because this is where it all started and for how much Survivor I’ve consumed, I’ve never seen its debut season. Wary because time and again, it’s noted how it took the show several seasons to really become what it is today. It turns out, I needed only be excited. For how much the game aspect of Survivor has evolved, I must admit, I kind of love the survival aspect of this season. We get so much more time in camp and with the contestants that I think there’s really a stronger sense of attachment by the end. What a delight!
Clipped – Gina Welch (FX on Hulu)
Let me start out by saying that I thought this series was going to be a disaster, Clipped was not only worthwhile but totally entertaining and often pretty good. What impressed me most, in fact, is that the show asks some pretty tough questions about race and responsibility in modern society, specifically what’s expected and asked of Black individuals in positions of relative power (especially amongst white society). I really loved the lens through which the aftermath of these events unfold. Ultimately, however, this show struggled mightily with two aspects which will be the reason it won’t have much consideration on my year-end list. The first, is that across the board, the portrayals of real characters (of very recent history!) history were hard to take seriously. The second is that this series did not have a subtle bone in its body. I understand that this is only a six episode miniseries so there’s only so much room for nuance but considering this is based on historical events, I would have loved the show not to paint with so broad a brush all the time.
Survivor (Season 2) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)
This was where my Survivor journey started 24 years ago. And I must say, I’m kind of astounded by how much I remembered. I wound up liking Borneo much more than I anticipated, but I can see why Season 2 remains such a favorite amongst fans. You start to have more strategic gameplay combined with a really unforgettable cast. I also think that discounting the Standard Definition of it all, that Australia might feature the best scenery and setting we’ve seen in the game so far (or maybe forever now that all seasons are shot in Fiji).
July
Survivor (Season 3) – Mark Burnett, Charlie Parsons, Jeff Probst (CBS)
Having recently watched and loved both Seasons 1 and 2, Survivor: Africa took me a while to warm up to. Because of its setting, I don’t know if there will ever be another season quite like it. Luckily, the season certainly got better as it went along and in the end, I have to say I really liked most of the final five or six contestants.
August
House of the Dragon (Season 2) – Ryan Condal (HBO Max)
I had a bit of an interesting journey after watching House of the Dragon‘s first season. Even though I held some reservations about the series, I was so excited about where it could be heading that I read the show’s source material, Fire & Blood, in its entirety. What surprised me is that I found this material, especially about the Dance of the Dragons, to be kind of tedious and if anything, my admiration of the show increased just based on the way it had been able to fill in the margins and take characters and storylines in new directions from what existed in the book. Still, I must admit, it kind of dampened my enthusiasm for the series’ long-awaited second season, which is a shame because overall, this season is pretty good and certainly an improvement on the first. That being said, I just don’t know if I find the Dance of the Dragons to be the most interesting lane for a Game of Thrones spinoff, and right or wrong, that will likely be my barrier from embracing it in the same way I did Thrones.
In Progress
Reservation Dogs (Season 3) – Sterlin Harjo, Taika Waititi (FX on Hulu)*
*Aired 2023
The English Teacher
Survivor (Season 47)
Done
The Bear (Season 3) – Christopher Storer (FX on Hulu)
Industry (Season 3)
Game of Thrones
Hacks
Sam Writes Shit 