Anna Sawai as Toda Mariko in a scene from Shogun. Photo / FX
Anna Sawai as Toda Mariko in a scene from Shogun. Photo / FX
It has been a wild year in television. Not one but two Emmy Award ceremonies! “The Daily Show” came back from the (almost) dead just in time for Jon Stewart to comment on a history-making presidential debate, and Brian Williams resurfaced to deliver a surreal broadcaston election night. The year abounded in whodunnits and mediocre, misguided or downright terrible limited series.Several ambitious (or expensive) shows featured lacklustre second or third seasons. But there have also been some unexpected pleasures, such as Apple TV Plus’ “Bad Monkey,” Max’s “It’s Florida, Man” and Hulu’s “La Maquina,” which reunited “Y Tu Mamà También” stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. Some shows tested the limits of what TV can (and can’t) do. “Baby Reindeer,” Richard Gadd’s brilliant, shattering, ethically dicey dissection of trauma and abuse - in which he re-enacted his own assault - won six Emmys and got Netflix sued for defamation. AndJohn Mulaney’s live experiment for Netflix, “Everybody’s in LA,” will get a second “season” in 2025. Below are 10 of the most interesting shows that aired this year.
10. ‘Fantasmas’
Julio Torres, the mind behind HBO’s “Los Espookys,” has emerged as a TV auteur. It’stough to summarise his latest project, “Fantasmas,” a comedy pastiche that doubles as a sure-footed, whimsical experiment in semi-serial dystopian futurism. The six-episode series for Max begins with a sprightly protagonist named Julio (Torres) pitching executives on a “clear”-coloured crayon he wants to call “Fantasma.” We follow Julio, who is in danger of losing his apartment, as he tries to get a biopsy for a birthmark, relocate a lost earring and figure out how to navigate these challenges without acquiring “Proof of Existence” (a bureaucratic requirement in this world). There is a mini-documentary about the letter Q (played by Steve Buscemi). Aidy Bryant plays a purveyor of “toilet dresses”. Guest stars include Emma Stone, Rosie Perez, Natasha Lyonne, Jaboukie Young-White and Rachel Dratch.
9. ‘The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show’
The Emmy-winning comic, who came out in his comedy special “Rothaniel,” introduced “The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” as an experiment in “trying to self-Truman Show,” referencing the 1998 Jim Carrey film. With cameras everywhere, and very little offstage or off-limits, the show yields a warts-and-all portrait of Carmichael as a friend, son and lover as he tries to bring his relationships and his ideas about authentic living into some kind of harmony. The results aren’t flattering; this might be the opposite of a vanity project. But that resistance to filtering out the bad stuff is also what makes it fascinating to watch.
Andrew Scott plays the title character in Netflix's new limited series, Ripley.
8. ‘Ripley’
Steven Zaillian’s “Ripley” is a gorgeous, witty extravaganza chronicling Patricia Highsmith’s famous charlatan’s journey from a bleak existence in New York City to a life of luxury in Italy. The settings are beautiful, but the people are not: The key innovation of “Ripley” (relative to the film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow) is its refusal to grant the trio even a hint of glamour. Andrew Scott expunges every trace of his considerable charm to produce a dour, awkward Tom Ripley whose joyless smile is as false as the signatures he fakes. One understands why this man wants to escape his grim surroundings. And why his genial but dim American target, a rich would-be artist named Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), offers to put him up in Italy: Scott plays the character as so overtly bland and unoffending he’s technically unimpeachable if a little repellent - as Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), an uninspired memoirist, discovers while trying to turn Dickie against him.
7. ‘Like Water for Chocolate’
Salma Hayek Pinault’s new adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel “Like Water for Chocolate” - as a sumptuous period melodrama forHBO - is a campy, erotic indulgence. Azul Guaita sparkles as Tita de la Garza, the youngest daughter of Mamá Elena (Irene Azuela), an aristocratic widow whose iron will keeps the hacienda running in turn-of-the-century Mexico, even as financial challenges (and revolutionary rumblings) mount. Sentenced to remain unmarried, Tita channels her feelings into her cooking - including her desire for Pedro Múqzuiz (Andrés Baida), who marries her older sister, Rosaura (Ana Valeria Becerril), instead. A nostalgia piece with a sense of humour, “Chocolate” relishes magical realist excess and commits to its most grotesque possibilities. If the soapier stuff coexists with much that is extremely specific and absurd and terribly sad, so much the better. The 1992 film was good, but Esquivel’s novel about excess and repression is exactly what a limited series is for.
6. ‘The Decameron’
Sure, it sounds like a dutiful and belated response to the coronavirus pandemic. But Kathleen Jordan’s bold riff on Giovanni Boccacio’s 14th-century opus is one of the year’s finest black comedies. The premise: 10 people with competing agendas end up hanging out at a luxurious estate to escapethe plague. A cast bursting with comedic talent includes Tony Hale as Sirisco, a harried steward; Leila Farzad as Stratilia, the estate’s secretive, no-nonsense cook; and Saoirse-Monica Jackson of “Derry Girls” as Misia, the slavishly devoted maid of a narcissist, Pampinea, played to perfection by Zosia Mamet. Point-of-view characters include Karan Gill’s Panfilo, a closeted gay man in a marriage of convenience, and Tanya Reynolds’ Licisca, a clever maidservant forced to serve Filomena, her master’s bratty and tyrannical daughter (Jessica Plummer). If you need a Netflixbinge over the holiday, this is the one to choose.
Somebody Somewhere. Photo / Supplied
5. ‘Somebody, Somewhere’
It’s a critical darling for a reason. Bridget Everett turned this unassuming comedy about unassuming people into a warm and honest reckoning with received ideas about home and community and the pursuit of happiness. An ode to platonic friendship set in Everett’s actual hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, “Somebody, Somewhere” portrays Sam’s return home after her sister’s death and tracks the evolution of her friendship with a high school acquaintance named Joel (Jeff Hiller) as well as her changing relationship to her family, her community and herself. Few great short stories end happily, and there’s a reason for that: Joy is hard to make transcendent. On a scaffolding of grief and loss, “Somebody, Somewhere” manages to do just that.
4. ‘English Teacher’
Set in Austin, Texas, this winsome comedy created by Brian Jordan Alvarez for FXspins gold out of a broad and politically prickly premise: Alvarez plays Evan Marquez, a gay English teacher at a public high school in a blue city in a red state. Evan isn’t a hero. He’s pragmatic, maybe a little selfish, and keenly interested in keeping some work/life balance while dealing with difficult parents, squabbling student groups and a supportive but conflict-averse principal (Enrico Colantoni). The cast includes history teacher Gwen (Stephanie Koenig, Alvarez’s longtime collaborator) and libertarian-ish PE teacher Markie (Sean Patton). The writing is sharp and the editing is savagely efficient: A punchline barely has time to land before the camera cuts to the next scene.
Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar’s wry seven-episode adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel for Maxfollows the misadventures of a Vietnamese double agent loyal to the Viet Cong. Referred to only as “the Captain” (Hoa Xuande), he struggles to keep the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese and the CIA happy while working as an operative in the US. By the time we meet him, he’s imprisoned by his own side. The story begins there, at the end, in a North Vietnamese re-education camp. In lieu of the hero’s welcome he expected, the Captain is tossed into a sweltering cell where he is ordered to pen the “confession” that structures the show. Like its protagonist, “The Sympathizer” signals from the start a compulsion to rebel against the genre it’s supposed to deliver. Bonuses include Sandra Oh and Robert Downey jnr.
2. ‘Say Nothing’
Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Troubles, FX’s “Say Nothing” tells the story of Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew) and her sister Marian’s (Hazel Doupe) recruitment into and eventual disillusionment with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, alongside the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 who was abducted from her flat in 1972. Switching between timelines, the series lays out a complicated and painful story about resistance, betrayal, loss, guilt, fury and regret. “Say Nothing” is a fundamentally political story that ramifies cruelly into the present as (variously) a bildungsroman, a confession, a history and a mystery. Its greatest achievement might be how powerfully it resists the sense of resolution each of those frames invites.
Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada in Shogun (2024). Photo / FX
1. ‘Shogun’
There’s a reason this series won a record-breaking 18 Emmy Awards in one season. “Shogun” condenses James Clavell’s enormous 1975 novel into a streamlined political thriller that doubles as a comedy - and sometimes a tragedy - of manners. Set in 1600s Japan, it opens with the arrival of English “pilot” John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) at a delicate moment in Japanese politics: The taiko has died, his heir is underage, and four members of the Council of Regents, which should be ruling in his stead, are instead plotting to impeach and kill the fifth, Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada). Toranaga ingeniously counters their plot with assistance from Blackthorne (whom he claims as his vassal) and Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai), a bitter but honour-bound interpreter who emerges as the spiritual centre of the series. Creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo spent 10 years refining this exquisite limited series, which is limited no more: In May, FX green-lit two additional seasons.
