The Golden Age of television is well and truly over. HBO—the biggest name in TV and arguably the most prestigious brand in entertainment—has been reduced to adaptations, reboots, and spinoffs of pre-existing IP. Gone are the days of The Sopranos or Deadwood. The brand replaced Succession with a Dune offshoot. It replaced Game of Thrones with a lesser version of Game of Thrones. The rest of the industry hasn’t fared much better. As a result, I couldn’t justify a full top 10.
8. X-Men ‘97 (Disney+): While X-Men ‘97 was hindered by its breakneck pace, the show captured the spirit of the X-Men as well as any adaptation before it.
7. Batman: Caped Crusader (Prime Video): At its heart, Caped Crusader is a monster-of-the-week-style Batman show featuring obscure baddies from the Dark Knight’s rogues’ gallery. I expected a nostalgia-driven reboot of Batman: The Animated Series, but Caped Crusader is fresh and surprising.
6. Invincible (Prime Video): Amazon continued its slow rollout of Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s superhero soap opera in 2024. The show hasn’t yet reached 25 episodes since debuting in April 2021, ensuring that new Invincible is always a treat. In some ways, Invincible’s hyper-violent, coming-of-age family drama is the zenith of superhero storytelling.
5. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (Crunchyroll): Frieren follows an adventuring party after they overcome the great evil. Think The Lord of the Rings post-Sauron. For Frieren, the party’s long-living elf, it involves watching her friends die around her in the prime of her life. Frieren is a rumination on life, death, loss, grief, guilt, and friendship with space for laughs and hijinks along the way.
4. Say Nothing (FX on Hulu): Andor showed us revolution in black and white. Say Nothing, a portrait of soldiers in the Irish Republican Army, presents it in moral gray. How do you know if the ends justify the means? How do you live with collateral damage?
3. The Bear (FX on Hulu): Following up a legendary season of television is never easy, especially when your stars are so booked and busy that you have to write and shoot two seasons simultaneously. (Just ask Atlanta.) In season three, The Bear stumbled and fell, recovered, and fell again. It was as uneven a season as a great show can have. Meandering at times and precise in others, even when The Bear is at its worst, it’s still really good.
2. Hacks (Max): The best comedy on television is also the best show about the entertainment industry, celebrity, and generation gaps. Hacks gleefully takes aim at two generations with main character energy: baby boomers and millennials.
1. Shōgun (FX on Hulu): Heading into Shōgun’s finale, I thought I knew where we were headed. What followed was one of the most transcendent hours of television in the history of the medium. Creating a satisfying finale is a challenge unto itself. Subverting viewer expectations and doing it anyway? Masterful.
amixedreview.com 