The best shows of 2024

In keeping with 2024’s finest show, let me begin this conversation by speaking about great shows that left me… disgruntled. The Honourable Mentions of 2024 are: The Sympathizer, where Robert Downey Jr does beautifully to basically play all the white people — the joke is that all white people look alike — but Park Chan-Wook’s first series could have used tighter writing; Baby Reindeer, that for all its compelling stickyness, felt weirdly exploitative; Say Nothing, a sensitive and beautifully acted series about The Troubles in Ireland that keeps diluting its own storytelling potency — a very un-Irish thing to do. Barzakh The most ambitious series to come out of the subcontinent, Barzakh is a mystifying work of magic realism — the story of a mythical book that never existed, while the show, fittingly enough, feels like an adaptation of a novel that Marquez never wrote. In 1989, Larry David brought us four selfish New Yorkers irritated by behaviour around them: Seinfeld was primarily about finding flaws in those we meet — in the way they speak too softly or aren’t worthy of sleeping with— and it became American television’s most enduring and most influential comedy. The Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm is Larry David’s critique of the human race, much in the same way as — as Quentin Tarantino’s characters said in Kill Bill — the weak and indecisive Clark Kent is Superman’s critique of the human race.