The best TV of 2024 so far

Nicole Kidman may be right about going to the movies — we do go to that place to laugh, to cry, to care, to see dazzling images on a huge silver screen. But, all but inevitably, eventually, we go home. And it’s there we also find a place where stories can feel like magic. In fact, it’s the longevity and intimacy of television that can make reactions feel so visceral; turns out, heartbreak can feel even better or worse when you invite it into your home once a week (or for a marathon weekend, or a few nights in a row, or again and again for months on end).

TV as an industry is in no short supply of shows that provide that indescribable feeling, and 2024 is no exception. While we may be coming down from our “peak TV” times, there’s still hundreds of scripted shows premiering this year, and already we have some candidates worthy of being remembered as some of the best TV of the year.

This is Polygon’s rolling list, where shows are ordered by most recent season finale (so you’ll find more recent additions at the top, and we’ll add more as they wrap their seasons). And we have a short section at the end devoted to late 2023 releases we didn’t have the time to consider for last year’s best-of list. At the end of the year, the Polygon staff will get together and vote on our favorites for a final, ranked list. But until then, what you can count on is the best shows of 2024 so far, and where to find them; a catalog of every TV offering that made our hearts flutter and where stories feel perfect and powerful. Because here — or there — they are.

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Dead Boy Detectives

Where to watch: Netflix

Dead Boy Detectives is the rare teen supernatural show that just has a lot of fun with its more wild elements. It follows two ghosts who run a detective agency and find themselves trapped in a small Pacific Northwest town for the foreseeable future. Teaming up with two teen psychics, they solve supernatural cases, which sometimes weave into a greater plot and their own backstories, but sometimes are just pure vibes and shenanigans. Though the show gets dark, especially when the ghosts trek to hell and back, it never forgets that it’s supposed to be a fun, paranormal romp with a host of charming characters. —Petrana Radulovic

Shōgun

Where to watch: Hulu

Shōgun felt like the first TV show in years that deserved everyone’s attention at once. It’s the rare modern show that’s beautifully shot, excellently written, thematically complicated, endlessly meme-able, and tremendously fun to watch, all at the same time. It was like a brief glimpse back to the glow of TV’s golden age filtering its way through the muck of the streaming era, and we couldn’t be luckier that it exists.

Perhaps Shōgun’s most impressive feat is its attention to detail. The series’ terrific 10-episode run starts out like it’s building a fantasy world, not by exoticising its 1600s Japanese setting, but by assuming its audience’s ignorance. It carefully builds in explanations of the country’s political power structure, its history with outsiders and religion, and its culture. Shōgun showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo want us to fully understand the world of the show before they let their characters loose to shape the country in their own image and change its course, because even the smallest details about the country’s history matter here.

But the show’s attention to detail serves more than just its story; it’s also how Shōgun builds out its themes. For both Mariko and Blackthorne, the series is about the ways that our cultures, both the one we’re raised in and the ones we adopt, can shape and mold us in unseen ways. There’s no clearer place for this theme to come out than in the ways each character views death. For Blackthorne, death is an ending, a finale to life that means nothing after it passes; for Mariko it’s an act of resistance, a way of exerting her will in a world that otherwise makes no room for her; and for Toranaga it’s always been a tool, a means of maneuvering through the world and shaping it to his will. All that simmering under the surface of a show with tremendous action, palace intrigue, and gory cannon strikes. What more could you possibly ask for from a television show? —Austen Goslin

Baby Reindeer

Where to watch: Netflix

You would hardly call it a comfort watch — it’s a discomfort watch if anything — but good luck tearing your eyes away from this bingeable, sad, funny, shocking, yet thoughtful miniseries. Part autobiography, part thriller, Baby Reindeer is the true-life story of a struggling comedian and his stalker, written by Scottish comic Richard Gadd, who also performs as a fictionalized version of himself. Jessica Gunning is astonishing as the stalker, Martha, a tragic and surprisingly empathetic figure. The show is as much about the mistakes Gadd made as the ways he was failed and tormented, and he’s excruciatingly honest about them. Baby Reindeer will leave you breathless — and not a little troubled. —Oli Welsh

Fallout

Where to watch: Prime Video

Successfully adapting a popular video game franchise, especially one as beloved as Fallout, is no easy task. For every well-done adaptation like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners or Arcane, there’s a dozen or so other examples that miss the mark, failing either to home in on the qualities that make its source material unique or reconfigure them into a compelling serialized drama for television. Fortunately, Fallout is the rare example of a TV adaptation that not only does justice to the original games, but feels like a natural continuation of them.

Like many of the games, the new series from showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet begins with a Vault Dweller, an inhabitant of a technologically advanced bunker designed to protect its occupants from nuclear radiation, embarking on a quest into the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic America. Unlike the games, however, audiences are introduced to this world through the viewpoint of three characters with different worldviews, which when taken together create a bleak yet comical vision of a world forever clawing its way out of the crater left by its past transgressions. The characters are fantastic, the action is intense and memorable, and the way the series iterates on the lore of the franchise opens up enticing new possibilities and questions for both itself and the games going forward.

Fallout nails the overall tone and aesthetic of the franchise, organically weaving together the iconography and aesthetics of the games into a world that feels both grounded and extraordinary. With all that said, the true strength of the show arguably rests on its trio of lead performances, with Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, and Aaron Moten serving as the perfect entry point for fans both new and old to explore this universe. Wagner and Robertson-Dworet have knocked it out of the park, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what else they have to bring to the world of Fallout. —Toussaint Egan

The Regime

Where to watch: Max

HBO is no stranger to series about power and prestige and the many ills they cause to pretty much everyone. Game of Thrones, The Righteous Gemstones, and Succession, to name just a few, have chronicled the way privilege insulates, hollows out, and corrupts those who have it, all to incredible effect. The Regime is just as entertaining, but it manages to speedrun the formula in six spellbinding episodes. I mean that literally: Kate Winslet as the leader of the titular but unnamed Eastern European regime is so captivating it’s hard not to be put under her spell.

Even more enthralling is how completely unexpected each episode feels. The chaos of Winslet’s autocracy constantly upsets expected plot beats and leaves the audience (and her entourage) unable to predict what will happen next. It’s also ferocious political satire, deftly skewering Western hegemony and dictatorial horrors as easily as it makes crude jokes about sex dreams. —Clayton Ashley

Physical: 100

Where to watch: Netflix

Physical: 100 is the most grueling, difficult, intimidating, exhausting, and genuinely kindhearted reality show on TV. Netflix’s Korean physical fitness series debuted its second season this year, and it was just as impressive as the first. One hundred contestants from a variety of sports and fitness backgrounds compete to see which one is the strongest and most fit of all, or as the show puts it, who has the most perfect physique.

But while the fantastic strength (and winning personalities) of the contestants gets you in the door, Physical: 100’s secret weapon is its excellent filmmaking. It’s not easy to convey the mind-boggling strength on display by every single one of the contestants, but Physical: 100 manages to do it wonderfully, giving us intimate looks at the strain on the participants’ faces, or the subtle flexes of their muscles as they dig deep to push just a little further in the competition. The series is shot and edited beautifully, adding tension and a sense of competitive uncertainty that makes every event a nail-biter. There’s no better evidence of the production’s genius than this year’s finale, which manages to communicate the phenomenal strength of its contestants, even as they’re locked in stalemates or making incremental progress. Physical: 100 is reality competition television at its absolute best: equal parts fun to watch and bafflingly impressive. —AG

Masters of the Air

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

Masters of the Air is the spiritual successor to Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and it absolutely measures up to its predecessors. The miniseries presents the story of the 100th Bomb Group, part of the American vanguard in the air over Europe during World War II. The high-end production uses Volume technology borrowed from The Mandalorian to bring to life whole fleets of B-17 bombers and their crews for an awe-inspiring historical drama. It’s made all the more likable thanks to a laundry list of A-list actors, like Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, and Callum Turner. Do not miss this miniseries, which provides some of the best WWII action in a generation. —Charlie Hall

Girls5eva

Where to watch: Netflix

The girls are back, on tour, thriving and surviving in the Divorced Dads Marriott Suitelettes. This is far from the glamour the Girls5eva envisioned for their big comeback, but Girls5eva finds all the sweetness, satire, and surprisingly thorough dental procedures to make season 3 feel like an event. If you’ve been looking for a great new sitcom — or, hey, a great sitcom to rewatch — Girls5eva is the best ticket in town. —ZM

The Floor

Where to watch: Hulu

Fox’s latest high-concept game show looks like trash in cut-up promos tailored for The Masked Singer fans. Turns out, it’s one of the more watchable trivia showdowns in ages.

The Floor positions 81 contestants, each with their own categories of expertise, across a 9-by-9 grid. The goal: Duel adjacent competitors, grab land, and be the last person standing at the end of the 10-episode run by owning the entire grid. The face-offs range in difficulty as contestants spend 45 seconds volleying back and forth between correct guesses in visual-driven name-that-thing categories like “entrepreneurs,” “horror movies,” and “stuff in a junk drawer.”

The Floor offers just enough strategy in the gameplay and how contestants command the board — round winners can either stay at the podium to keep amassing floor or go back to the grid to be re-challenged — that host Rob Lowe is given minimum time to yuk it up on stage. Because it’s the same players each week, there are favorites and high stakes — exactly what you want out of this type of “brainless” TV. —Matt Patches

True Detective: Night Country

Where to watch: Max

The inexplicable abounds in True Detective: Night Country. Ennis — the town on the fringes of the Alaskan tundra, the Arctic circle, and maybe even the fabric of reality — is a place where mysteries are everywhere, whether they’re big (a murder) or small (a ghost pointing the way).

What makes Night Country such a blast is the way it refuses to settle those, even as it reckons with them. This isn’t a show about the police, it’s a show about investigating, a journey of questions as much as it is a quest for answers. It’s True Detective at its finest, building procedural and paranormal into a swirl of horror, no matter which way it goes. —Zosha Millman

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Where to watch: Prime Video

Donald Glover and co-creator Francesca Sloane’s unlikely reinvention of the Brad-and-Angelina ’00s action comedy is perhaps the most purely pleasurable TV show to hit in the early months of the year.

Beautiful location shoots, cool clothes, tense action, iconic guest stars, and fantastic chemistry between Glover and co-lead Maya Erskine are packaged up in a disarmingly casual way: Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the intimate moments, caught between missions, of the office romance of two failing superspies. —OW

Masters of the Universe: Revolution

Where to watch: Netflix

Kevin Smith’s delightfully over-the-top extension of the original 1980s He-Man continuity takes itself about as seriously as the phrase “original 1980s He-Man continuity” suggests it should.

This lively cartoon sinks deep into the lore of the Mattel action figures, but only so it can then mash that lore up, invert it, and reinvent it, all in the service of creating more action figures. It’s as it should be — an old heavy metal album cover come to glorious life — and among the voice cast, Mark Hamill and William Shatner are in top form. —OW

Bluey season 3

Where to watch: Disney Plus, Hulu

The Australian children’s show about a family of anthropomorphic dogs continues to pack storytelling punches in just under eight minutes per episode.

Bluey is all about the power of imagination, and brings the parents into the fold of Bluey and her sister’s little games — which often reflect real-life problems and anxieties. If you think you’re too old for Bluey, or you don’t have any kids to watch it with, you’re probably wrong! It’s some good TV! —PR

The best December 2023 TV we couldn’t consider last year

Pokémon Concierge

Where to watch: Netflix

The adorable stop-motion anime from the studio behind Rilakkuma and Kaoru explores a different side of the Pokémon world from what we usually see. Instead of battles and catching them all, Pokémon Concierge is all about Pokémon living their lives and relaxing. It’s also about tackling anxiety head-on and not letting that define your life! Plus, the Pokémon are incredibly adorable. —PR