Best New TV Shows of 2024

This was a big year for shows created by and starring relative newcomers, and none made a bigger splash than Richard Gadd’s dramatization of a pair of traumatic incidents from his past: being stalked by a mentally unwell woman, and being groomed and raped by a writer whose work he admired. Controversy inevitably rose up once fans of the show went looking for the real stalker — who in turn sued Gadd and Netflix for defamation. But Gadd’s work, as both writer and actor, was so raw, and so self-excoriating, that it’s not hard to look at Baby Reindeer as a riveting piece of art, separate from the legal and ethical quagmire.

Though also a showcase for its creator-star, Diarra From Detroit was a much lighter, less fraught experience than Baby Reindeer. Diarra Kilpatrick plays a Motor City schoolteacher going through it in the aftermath of a breakup with her longtime partner. Ghosted by a Tinder hookup she felt she’d made a real connection with, the fictional Diarra decides to play amateur gumshoe, convinced that the only reason such a man would have stopped messaging her was if he was in some sort of danger. What follows is part quarter-life-crisis comedy, part mystery, part romance, and 100 percent announcement that Kilpatrick is a talent to be watched.

We’re three-for-three in actor-as-auteur shows, though this one had a more familiar creator in Natasha Rothwell. The Insecure and White Lotus alum wrote herself one hell of a part, as an airport worker determined to expand and improve her solitary existence after she clinically dies for a few minutes and wakes up to discover that she’s her own emergency contact. How to Die Alone was a solid blend of pathos, absurdity — particularly in its depiction of the quirky goings-on behind the scenes at JFK — and fantasy. Rothwell is heading back to The White Lotus next year, but here she proved that she can write her own material as well as she can bring someone else’s to life. 

Like the Stefon sketches that he used to write for Bill Hader on SNL, John Mulaney’s live talk-show stunt had everything: Richard Kind, a medium, O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, a robot, and look: It’s Waingro from Heat, wearing a bathrobe and doing stand-up comedy! (In a bit that cracked up Hader more than any last-second Stefon cue-card change ever did.) Everybody’s in L.A. was so energetic and inventive that of course Netflix asked Mulaney to do a live weekly talk show next year. Something to actually look forward to in 2025!

Max hasn’t said anything about a potential second season of Kite Man, so the Harley Quinn spin-off is likely the latest victim of fun-hating Warner Discovery chairman David Zaslav, who never saw an entertaining project he couldn’t make disappear. But if these 10 episodes — focusing on the titular bad guy (Matt Oberg) buying a Gotham City bar and running it with girlfriend Golden Glider (Stephanie Hsu) and unloved henchman Bane (James Adomian) — are all we got, at least we got to enjoy them in all their weird, twisted anarchy. Among the highlights: a running gag where the Queen of Fables (Janelle James) kept stealing bodies to attach her decapitated head to; gangster Moe Dubelz (Michael Imperioli) walking around in denial of the death of his conjoined twin brother Joe; and Bane and other characters visiting the Eighties with the help of a time-traveling toilet. OK, now that we read that sentence aloud, we can see why a corporate suit might not sprint to hit the renewal button. But enjoy the twisted, funny season before it inevitably gets erased from the streamer altogether as a tax write-off.

We’re as surprised about this as you are. Even once we got past the shock of the show’s central twist — it’s not entirely a remake of the old Andy Griffith legal drama, since Kathy Bates’ character is only pretending to be a harmless old woman named Matlock while she seeks revenge against the law firm she blames for the opioid-related death of her daughter — the new Matlock still felt somewhat caught between fish and fowl. Eventually, though, creator Jenni Snyder Urman, as she did with the late, great Jane the Virgin, found a clever balance between old and new, so that this Matlock gets to have things both ways, especially when the work in her fake identity hits a little too close to home. Bates has said this will be her final acting role, and she’s leaving nothing on the table for it.   

Admittedly, we’ve got questions about this romantic-comedy, where a woman who hosts a podcast about her messy sex life (Kristen Bell) falls for a rabbi who’s just out of a long-term relationship (Adam Brody). For starters, how does a well-to-do Angeleno like Bell’s Joanne know basically nothing about Judaism? Wouldn’t she at minimum have gone to a bunch of bat mitzvahs in junior high? And isn’t Brody’s Noah too old (even allowing for the stars to be playing a bit younger than they are in real life) to still be waiting to get his first solo rabbinical job? And… well, we could do this all day, but it ultimately doesn’t matter, because Bell and Brody are old pros at the genre whose chemistry is so strong, you stop interrogating the premise very quickly and just sit back to enjoy them together. Bonus: their crackling banter with co-stars Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons as their respective “loser siblings.”

Not every author is the person best suited to adapt their own book into a filmed medium, but Candice Carty-Williams sure turned out to be. This miniseries inspired by her 2019 bestseller follows Queenie (sensationally played by relative newcomer Dionne Brown), a young British-Jamaican woman who describes herself as “loud, brash, sassy, confrontational, bitchy.” What starts out seeming like it will be something comedic in the vein of, as Carty-Williams herself once put it, “Black Bridget Jones” instead turns out to be a thoughtful and sad examination of how easy it is to let traumas from your past lead to mistakes in your present.

Finally, the alphabet takes us to the historical epic section of our list, with the first of two shows that tried to cover a lot of complicated territory, sometimes navigating it brilliantly, at other times stumbling. This adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s sprawling nonfiction book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland decided to tell its story through the eyes of IRA member Dolours Price (played at various ages by Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake). At times, it felt like Say Nothing was having difficulty deciding whether it cared more about the forest or the trees, but in many parts — notably, an episode about Dolours and her sister staging a months-long hunger strike in an English prison — it was harrowingly effective.

Between having legendary South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook serve as co-creator and chief director, and using newly-minted Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. in multiple roles, this adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s satirical novel about a North Vietnamese double agent (Hoa Xuande) seemed like it was going to make a big splash. That didn’t really happen — even at awards season, Hollywood did the most Hollywood thing possible by giving the sole Emmy nomination to RDJ, rather than any of the Asian actors or storytellers who worked with him — but we enjoyed the audacity of The Sympathizer nonetheless, particularly in the stylistically unconventional choices Park made behind the camera.