David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Aidan Turner, Emily Atack and Nafessa Williams in Rivals. Photo / Disney
From sexy dramas to brilliant comedy and genre-bending reality television, this year has had something for everyone, including an enormous disappointment.
Over seven episodes, creator and star Richard Gadd unfolds a personal story that is so dark, twisted, funny and wildly original, it’s a shame the response to it has been overshadowed by the multimillion-dollar debate over its opening five words.
Running a “This is a true story” disclaimer is of course no big deal: similar words have been used on screen hundreds of times without drama – the Coen brothers have done it even with shows that are entirely fictional.
The difference with Baby Reindeer is that its “true” story paints a deeply negative picture of a person who was easily identifiable, who disagrees vehemently with the show’s opening five words, and who is now seeking US$170m ($300m) in damages. It was the show’s only misstep and it didn’t need to happen. We want to watch great stories and there has been no better story this year than Baby Reindeer.
Where to watch: Netflix
Because we find people funnier when we like them and it’s hard to like them until we know them, comedies generally take at least a few episodes to get going. Not this one. The eponymous teacher and protagonist is a lovable disaster from the get-go and his best friend and fellow teacher, played by Stephanie Koenig, is an insecure, narcissistic comic delight. They are that rare thing: terrible people you want to spend time with.
The whole cast is amazing, the second episode dance scene feels like a comedy landmark and episode seven, in which they attend the “Dallas Teaching and Learning Conference”, is one of the best episodes of any genre this year.
Where to watch: Disney+
Would the Dallas Cowboys have given documentary maker Greg Whiteley such complete access to one of their prize assets had they realised how exploitative it would make them look?
Kat Puryear, who was part of the cheer team until 2024, tells viewers her pay was roughly equivalent to that of a fulltime fast-food worker. You could make a case that any given player on the football team delivers more value to the Cowboys than any given cheerleader, but you could not make any case that they deliver 700 times more value, which is the approximate difference between the salaries of the cheerleaders and that of the team’s highest-paid player. Then there’s the constant body judgment, the objectification, the cruelty of the cutting process and the brutal emotional and physical toll.
The final bitter irony is that for all the talk of the importance of hard work, their boss is a nepo baby whose dad owns the company. It’s admirable that the show never shies away from these issues, but what really makes it great is how poignantly it captures the lives of the cheerleaders and how incisively it portrays the thrill and suffering that comes with achieving one’s dreams.
Where to watch: Netflix
The eponymous star, a well-known but not-yet A-list American comedian, says early on in this painful confessional piece of televisual genius that he wants to turn his life into a kind of Truman Show. Of course, Truman didn’t know he was on The Truman Show, so this is a logical impossibility, but then almost everything about Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show is a logical impossibility.
It’s a genre-bending piece of reality theatre incorporating bits of stand-up, confessional, vérité, set-pieces and assorted provocations, most of which seem to be designed to alienate the people closest to him. It’s Carmichael’s project, so he shows only what he wants to show, but it’s hard to imagine he left out anything more exposing, embarrassing and personally damaging than what he left in.
The question at the heart of the show is: was it all worth it? The answer: it depends how you define “worth it”. Part of what makes this show so great is that, in Carmichael’s case, it’s almost impossible to say.
Where to watch: Neon
The guy who made Tiger King followed it up with something even better. The only measure by which it’s worse is its morals and, ironically, it’s its exploration of this moral failure that makes it better. Even more ironically, the moral failure is a direct result of Tiger King: after making that show, about the bizarre world of tiger lover Joe Exotic, documentarian Eric Goode knew he wanted to make a story about the chimp-loving/owning Tonia Haddix, but he also knew the notoriety he’d achieved with Tiger King meant she would never want to participate. So he brought in a “proxy director”, a name he uses because, presumably, “A lie in human form” didn’t sound as good.
Is it okay to lie if you’re convinced you’re lying for good reasons? What is right and what is wrong when it comes to the tricky question of whether one should gain and then betray the trust of a human to protect an animal? What about when it comes to the equally tricky question of how one ensures their Netflix documentary is a hit? That Goode embraces these questions is what makes the series good, but it’s when he makes himself a character in his own movie that it becomes truly outstanding.
Where to watch: neon
All I remember about the 2005 movie version of Mr & Mrs Smith is an excruciatingly long and boring early action scene preceded by some equally dull dialogue. I literally have no idea what happened after that because, I assume, the brain finds it easier to retain memories of moments in which it has experienced real human feeling.
It’s hard to fathom how a movie so bad could have yielded a TV spin-off so good, so pleasurable, so quirky and so decidedly non-mainstream in tone and content. “Morally complex comedy action thriller” is a difficult genre to pull off, but it works here in large part because it’s made by and stars Donald Glover, one of the great creative geniuses of our time.
Where to watch: Prime Video
The balancing of adult jokes and storylines in kid-friendly formats has long been mastered at the movies by Pixar et al, but in TV, there hasn’t been much of it since mid-late 90s The Simpsons. Nobody could have anticipated it would arrive in the form of a television spin-off of a movie that was itself a spin-off of a video game.
The humour and pathos of Adam Pally as Wade Whipple is as powerful as anything on television right now and far beyond what we have a right to expect from a light family series. His performance alone would be enough to elevate this show above most of the “family TV” dross, but in fact it’s just the beginning.
The cast includes some of the greatest comic actors working today – including Edi Patterson, Julian Barratt and Cary Elwes – and they all deliver. The humour gets weirder and more surreal as the series goes on and it would have been impossible to explain to my 7-year-old had he asked, but of course he didn’t because he was only there for the animated echidna and fight scenes.
The movies on which the show is derived are themselves pretty good, but this is much, much better. An underrated gem.
Where to watch: TVNZ+
During the now-infamous episode in which young Catherine tells Jonathan to describe in great detail – and for a very long time – what he would like to do to Kylie Minogue’s boobs, my wife talked, laughed, mocked and generally provided a running critical commentary until eventually, I felt compelled to tell her she was ruining the show for me.
To her credit, she did stop, but later, after the episode had finished, she started right back up again, telling me not just how bad and exploitative the show was, but that the internet thought so too. This turned out not to be true (critics have been deeply divided), but I didn’t care either way. I was hooked from the opening episode, in which director Alfonso Cuaron established a mysterious, intriguing plot, flooded the screen with natural light in a series of beautiful rooms featuring enormous windows and made the story dense with jeopardy, grief and eroticism.
Disclaimer is expansive, excessive, over the top, often unbelievable and ultimately captivating. Yes, some critics truly hated it (“Alfonso Cuaron’s Disclaimer is excruciatingly bad,” wrote the New Statesman), but I’ve now read many of those reviews and not one of them has called it boring.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
After I’d watched the first 20 minutes of the first episode of this documentary, which follows US high school kids in order to portray their relationships with their smartphones, it was several weeks before I felt able to come back to it. Every time I sat down in front of the TV I found the thought of it too much. I was particularly troubled by the show’s early scene showing all those kids in the bleachers, glued to their phones, nominally listening to their teachers talk about the new school year ahead, but texting one another ignorant questions about things they’d have understood had they not been on their phones. It would have been comedy were it not so horrific.
My own kids are not far off the age at which they will begin begging for phones, and this dystopian view of what looms in their future put me into a funk. The people in this show are destined to inherit this planet we’ve ruined and unless TikTok makes some major changes to its algorithm soon, I can’t see how they’re going to save it.
Where to watch: Disney+
Several other projects this year attempted to cash in on Olympics fever, notably the enjoyable but overlong Sprint, but Simone Biles was easily the best.
It’s not fair to the filmmakers to say they didn’t need to do much to get a great product from their raw material, but it is fair to say that Biles’ story is unbelievably perfect documentary fodder: her solo mother’s struggles with alcohol and drugs, her time in foster care, her adoption by her grandfather and step-grandmother, her prodigious talent, her rise to the top, the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of predatory doctor Larry Nassar, her breakdown at the Olympics where she was supposed to dominate, and her incredible comeback four years later.
But story alone is not enough. What elevates this documentary is the filmmakers’ access, not just to competitions and to Biles herself, but to her roiling inner world. Their great achievement is they were able to tap into and show the world the emotional heart of one of history’s greatest athletes.
Where to watch: Netflix
A fantastically rendered 1980s world, awash in wealth and egos, rich with cheese and dripping with desire: like many of this year’s best shows, Rivals’ thrills are in its lack of restraint.
Every knob has been turned up to max: the visual symbolism is consistently and unashamedly on the nose and so is the innuendo. Rivals exists first to entertain, secondly to depict rampant, unbridled sex and thirdly to show us the ways in which the rich and powerful are not as good as us.
It will make you feel dirty, it will make you feel guilty, it will make you feel like moving to a mansion in the British countryside in 1986.
Where to watch: Disney+
The first two seasons were exquisitely prepared and presented plates of food, meticulously crafted to deliver maximum pleasure; the television equivalent of tweezer food. So it was greatly disappointing to find the latest season is three-day-old KFC reheated in the microwave.
Maybe it was my sky-high expectations that made it feel so disappointing, or maybe it was the fact it’s so bad. The adoring, lingering shots of Carmy’s Italian renaissance face in its unchanging state of perpetual torment start first to wear and then to grate, although not as much as the repetitiously unfunny “comic relief” of the brothers known as “The Faks”, whose fast-talking idiots routine comes 70 years after that style of comedy died a deserved and never-lamented death.
Tellingly, the season’s best episode, Ice Chips, is disconnected from the show’s central narrative, features only one core cast member and is carried by the brilliant performance of a guest star (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Almost the entirety of that episode takes place in a birthing suite, with only Sugar and her mother (Curtis) for company. It could be viewed without watching the rest of the series and ideally should be.
I was in the midst of offering silent thanks for the episode’s relief from the series’ many annoyances as it reached its final scene: Jamie Lee Curtis leaves the birthing suite, walks out into the corridor and sits down – next to the Faks.
Where to watch: Disney+
'I forbade my mother from seeing it. There's a lot of sex talk in the show.'