Best of 2024: TV

They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be entirely certain that it really was Colin Farrell inside all those prosthetics as he romped his way through the gripping second season of The Penguin (Sky Atlantic).

Then we had Eddie Redmayne as the titular character in Sky Atlantic’s rather ponderous revamp of The Day of the Jackal (“The Day of the Jackal feels like a month,” as one sceptic noted), Keira Knightley taking the Netflix shilling in the ditzy political thriller Black Doves, Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Saarsgard in Apple TV’s remake of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, and Michael Douglas revisiting the American Revolution in Apple’s Franklin. The tussle between widescreen and home entertainment was exemplified to perfection in the abrupt departure of Kevin Costner from Taylor Sheridan’s epic Western saga Yellowstone (Paramount+), meaning he was absent from the recently-aired final episodes.

Costner departed to work on his own movie series Horizon: An American Saga, but he might be riding the wrong horse, leaving Sheridan with the last laugh. Yellowstone and its multiple spin-offs are just one dimension of Sheridan’s rapidly-expanding telly-universe, which has recently brought us Billy Bob Thornton’s pivotal role in the Texas oil drama Landman and the droll Sylvester Stallone vehicle Tulsa King, as well as Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldana in Lioness, about a female-led CIA undercover unit. For good measure, Kidman also starred alongside Liev Schreiber in Netflix’s satirical whodunnit, The Perfect Couple (pictured below).Happily, we didn’t see too much of Harry and Meghan this year, and Harry’s series Polo (Netflix) was summed up in one of very few reviews as “a mostly boring look at a sport that very few people outside of elite circles have any particular interest in.” However, we did experience the weird spectacle of two separate dramatisations of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight encounter with Emily Maitlis. It was hard to believe that there could be that much demand for a dramatised version of a TV interview, but this was at least stylishly handled in Netflix’s Scoop, with a pair of cracking performances by Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell (pictured above). Far less compelling was Amazon Prime’s three-parter A Very Royal Scandal, with Ruth Wilson and Michael Sheen. For 2025, perhaps we can look forward to a 10-part drama about Andrew and his interesting Chinese friend.

The good old rock-doc has been proving popular out in streamer-land, though quantity and quality aren’t always in perfect harmony. The Beach Boys (Disney) was, to quote myself, “a beautiful-looking, film though not an especially insightful one”, while the same company’s four-part history of Bon Jovi wasn’t so much thorough as teeth-grindingly pedantic and at least an hour too long. On the other hand, Sky Documentaries’ Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple revealed Bruce Springsteen’s faithful lieutenant to be a far more intriguing character than you might have suspected, while the HBO series Stax: Soulsville USA (available on NOW) was a valuable exploration of the fabled Memphis-based soul label.

- Adam Sweeting

How lucky we are to have a theatrical tradition that produces magisterial “classical” actors who then get to share their talent with a mass TV audience. Prompting this thought were two such actors who graced the best dramas of the year for me: Slow Horses 4 and the tragic finale of Wolf Hall.

Jonathan Pryce (pictured above) appeared in both. His turn as River’s grandad in Slow Horses was delicately poignant in what is often knockabout violent farce, as he slipped blankly into the twilight world of dementia. He also popped up as the chatty ghost of Wolsey in The Mirror and the Light, communing with the increasingly doomed, unmoored Thomas Cromwell of Mark Rylance. Both series were superbly cast from high to low, tautly scripted and directed. They led a strong pack: classic twisty thriller Presumed Innocent; the intense psychological dramas After the Party and Baby Reindeer; savage new instalments of Industry and Sherwood; gloriously filthy Rivals.

The Comedy bin was less well stocked, though Netflix’s highwaywoman romp Renegade Nell was a nice surprise, with peachy roles for Derry Girl Louisa Harland as a tomboyish footpad and Nick Mohammed as an 18th century Tinkerbell. (Unaccountably, series two has been cancelled.)

It was left to the finales of Gavin & Stacey and Inside No 9 to fly the flag, along with the third series of the fine Sophie Willan comedy-drama Alma’s Not Normal. Ballsy. Boltonian Alma and her bonkers family – Siobhan Finneran and Lorraine Ashbourne (pictured below) – are some of my favourite comic creations. Alma’s grandma Joan, like her vengeful Daphne in Sherwood, allowed Ashbourne to explore a quality she doesn’t always get to exercise: the pathos of a woman who experiences a huge loss and can’t for once brazen her way past it. Her Sherwood nemesis, Ann Branson, has to be one of the most hateful characters on the small screen, played with venomous aplomb by the chameleon Monica Dolan, also a standout in ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office as a wronged postmistress.By a nose, though, my best actress award goes to Robyn Malcolm in After the Party, as an embittered New Zealand teacher forced to accept the husband she has accused of paedophilia (excellent Peter Mullan) back into the community. The script masterfully manipulated the audience’s sympathies as the action looped back and forth. And as the gay teenager Malcolm sees her husband with, new face Ian Blackburn was mesmerising.

Hats off, too, to Lilit Lesser’s imperious Princess Mary in The Mirror and the Light and to young Jacob Ferguson in Shetland, who, as a traumatised child, gave a nuanced, troubling performance. As did Jessica Gunning as the vicious harasser in Baby Reindeer, along with the drama’s writer/lead Richard Gadd, though it was a series with worrying claims to be a “true story”.

Unlike the French docudrama series Sambré: Anatomy of a Crime, an impeccable recreation of the decades-long career of rapist Enzo Salina that carefully set each stage in its social and historical context and shone a harsh light on the French legal system’s flaws. Let’s hope the same creative team get the Gisèle Pelicot case to work on.

- Helen Hawkins

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