Popcorn Culture: 2024 Flashback: TV

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2024 TV Shows I Missed That I Wish I Had Seen Before Compiling This List: Baby Reindeer, Fantasmas, The Sticky

2024 TV Shows I Missed, Don't Regret Missing, and Will Go Out of My Way to Continue Missing Until the End of Linear Time: Sausage Party: Foodtopia, American Sports Story, Doctor Odyssey, High Potential, Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage

Top Seven Episodes of 2024

#7 "There Will Be Blood" Chucky

There are definitely elements of season 3 that have gotten too out there, but this episode is a prime slice of Chucky kookiness. An elevator full of blood and a William Shatner needle drop sure do lift the spirits.

#6 "Kid in a Candy Store" Dexter: Original Sin

I've never watched a single episode of the original Dexter, but I've been enjoying my sojourn into this prequel starring Patrick Gibson in the title role. Even though the show is still failing to integrate Dexter's father and sister as well as it wants to at this point, everything with Dexter himself has settled into an excellent place, and I absolutely adored the recurring gag of him eating categorically too many cubano sandwiches.

#5 "Valley of the Dolls" Only Murders in the Building

Look, any episode that somehow managed to get a catfight between Meryl Streep and Melissa McCarthy onto my screen is going to end up on the list. I'm only human.

#4 "Familiar by Thy Side" Agatha All Along

I usually hate side quest episodes that take a long break from the main plot to drill deep on a single character. But this one contained some very fun twists and turns and ends with Kathryn Hahn delivering the performance of a lifetime while absolutely covered in mud, so color me surprised.

#3 "Home" Heartstopper

Heartstopper seasons 2 and 3 have been very up and down, but the highs of this show are still incredibly high. And this episode that separates Nick and Charlie while the former is on vacation and the latter is having a particularly low mental health moment finds all the best heartstrings to pull.

#2 "Headhunting" What We Do in the Shadows

I grew instantly tired of Laszlo's attempt at creating a Frankenstein monster, but the material where Nandor and Nadja attempt to help Guillermo succeed at his new office job is top-shelf comedy dynamite.

#1 "Lonely Fans" The Charlie Puth Show

This is a show that has no reason to exist. The fact that it's a scripted Roku Channel original about Charlie Puth trying to put a reality show together is simply unhinged. But the fact that it's actually secretly hilarious is even more wild. This episode, which follows Charlie finding himself surprisingly pleased with rumors that he's dating an elderly fan, includes many of the show's best moments and displays an intoxicatingly playful approach to language, from the off-kilter phraseology Charlie uses to describe a plaque that he's been given to the way multiple characters inexplicably drop the "the" from "the Internet."

Bottom Three Episodes of 2024

#3 "War" Mary & George

Although Mary & George starts off promising, injecting a period costume drama with a heaping helping of human messiness, sex, and violence, this finale unspooled the last bit of story in an impotent and tedious way that made me question why they even bothered in the first place.

#2 "Maiden Mother Crone" Agatha All Along

Forget the cheap Ren Faire costumes and the terrible wig they clearly put on that child actor in order to punish him, this episode spends so much time explaining stuff that truly needed no explanation, wasting everyone's time by indulging in the show's worst instincts (AKA assuming that "Ballad of the Witch's Road" is a strong enough song to be used more than twice in the entire miniseries).

#1 "The Prophecy Comes True" Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Completing our trio of bad finales, here comes ol' Percy Jackson season 1 once more after churning out some other notably bad episodes in late 2023. This final episode is incoherent drivel that provided the last nail in the coffin of my assurance that the chorus of people insisting this show was better than the Logan Lerman movies have lost their sweet minds.

Best Actor: Kayvan Novak, What We Do in the Shadows

What We Do in the Shadows has one of the funniest ensembles in modern television, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give Kayvan Novak his laurels before it's too late. In the show's final season, Nandor is just as unique and bizarre a character as ever, and some of Novak's line readings are so unexpected and hilarious that you might need to double check that your insurance covers busted guts. His physical comedy is also impeccable. Him smacking a counter with a mop while pretending to be a janitor just might be one of the best moments of the show, period.

Best Actress: Kathryn Hahn, Agatha All Along

I believe I already mentioned her slam-dunk performance while covered in mud, which should be enough to convince you I've made the right call here, but she effortlessly twists from drama to comedy without breaking a sweat, and manages to craft a coherent character out of teleplays that constantly let her down.

Best Supporting Actor: Mike O'Donnell, The Charlie Puth Show

This is Mike O'Donnell's first role in anything. As far as I can tell, he's not an actor. I think he's just Charlie Puth's actual friend. So why is he giving such a winning comic performance here? Honestly, he's even better than Charlie, who has charisma but is obviously trying to act. Mike just has it.

Best Supporting Actress: Jenny Walser, Heartstopper

Tori Spring is really coming to the fore this season, and Jenny Walser has risen to the challenge of making a ferocious and prickly character the most instantly lovable of this entire ensemble.

Best Recurring Actor: Eva Longoria, Only Murders in the Building

Eva Longoria proved long ago that she's willing to poke fun at herself with her cameo in 2013's In a World..., but her newest turn playing herself onscreen is even more deliciously vicious and hilarious.

Best Trans/Nonbinary Actor: Yasmin Finney, Heartstopper

Look, I'm gonna stop awarding her when she stops knocking every one of her scenes out of the park.

Biggest Laugh: The Doorbell, Single, Out

So, I didn't mention Single, Out last year because I feel like it would just be punching down. This good-bad Australian queer dramedy might as well be a web series with its bargain basement budget and generally poor filmmaking and storytelling quality. But every now and again, it produces a moment so bafflingly perfect that it must be rewarded, like the scene in the season 2 finale when we are anticipating that the ex of the main character, Adam, might show up unexpectedly. Which is why we, the audience, are not surprised to hear the doorbell ring. However, Adam is. He turns to ask his mother a question. Instead of asking who that might be at the door, he inquires about when they installed the doorbell, which begins one of the show's signature loopy, loose, circular conversations. I truly don't know if that incredibly weird reversal of expectations happened on purpose or what, but it really caught me off guard and tickled my funny bone.

Biggest Cry: Charlie Asks For Help, Heartstopper

Joe Locke really nails the puppy dog eyes vulnerability thing, so of course the scene where his character Charlie admits to his parents that he has an eating disorder works like gangbusters.

Biggest Scream: The Salem Seven, Agatha All Along

Hey look, another Joe Locke scene! He's had quite a year. The sequence in episode two where he is trying to barricade Agatha's house while the creepy-ass J-horror coven approaches down the street is the stuff of nightmares.

Biggest Squirm: The Fingerprints, Uzumaki

This hotly anticipated (by me) Junji Ito anime adaptation was kind of a mess, but sometimes you can't help but stumble into a gold mine by simply putting one of the horror manga master's decadently macabre storylines on the screen, like this moment where a character cuts off her own fingerprints in a desperate attempt to rid herself of all spirals.

Biggest Thirst: Basically All Of It, Mary & George

This entire show is about Nicholas Galitzine using his body to seduce a lecherous king and all the other ways he weaponizes his sexuality to his advantage. The word "homoerotic" is, if anything, too mild to use as a proper descriptor for Mary & George.

Best Intro Sequence: Dexter: Original Sin

I know this is incredibly similar to the original show's intro, but it's an elevation of it. I think all of this is just tremendously effective. The back and forth of the Morgan family getting their day started is a perfect way of subtly establishing the differences in all the characters while also highlighting the more ensembley nature of this version of the show. And they also find so many delicious visual ways to compare the process of getting ready for the day to committing murder that it's almost criminal in and of itself.

Best SNL Sketch: "Papyrus 2"

Of course they were going to do a sequel to one of their most popular sketches when Ryan Gosling returned to host SNL. It was inevitable. What wasn't inevitable is that it's nearly as good as the original. They have the poster designers for Avatar 2 to thank for that, of course, but they really snatched that ball and ran with it.

Worst SNL Sketch: "Bowen's Straight"

"Straight man acts gay" has been a common trope for mining cheap laughs over the years, and it turns out that "gay man acts straight" is just as pathetic a ploy. Flipping the script isn't always the answer, especially if the script sucks in the first place.

Best Guest Star: Law Roach, The Charlie Puth Show

I'm not a fashion guy, so this was my first encounter with Law Roach, but I hope it's not my last. He is a volcanic eruption of charisma and totally unafraid to embrace the surreal, practically supernatural, version of himself that the show depicts.

Worst Guest Star: Jay Duplass, Percy Jackson and the Olympians

When you cast the Greek god Hades, you either need to go full terrifying or swing the opposite direction and have him be insidiously nice and charming. With Jay Duplass, you get neither of those things, just a middle-of-the-road milquetoast nothing of a character.

Best Needle Drop: "See You Again" Charlie Puth, The Charlie Puth Show

Really, I'm telling you, this is genuinely one of the funniest shows of the year. This track comes from the aforementioned number one episode of the year, where the end Charlie's fake relationship with an elderly woman causes him to reflect on their time together as underscored by one of his most achingly sincere songs. It's an obvious choice, sure, but the way it drops into the episode at the exact right nanosecond needs to be studied.

Best Line: "Jake's hair is naturally curly, you monsters." Chucky

I love the fact that suggesting that Jake might have gotten a perm is among one of the worst crimes Chucky & Co. have committed.

Worst Commercial: "That's Magic" AMC Theatres

The original Nicole Kidman AMC ad was magical, so when they announced they'd be launching new versions of it, I was very nervous that they wouldn't recapture its guileless lunatic spirit. But I couldn't have possibly predicted just how wrong things would go. They did not introduce any new material. They simply cut down the existing ad from 60 seconds to 30, in a few different configurations, adding outtakes from the original shoot willy nilly.

It's not like the original monologue was perfectly legible, but these cuts make an absolute hash of it. Like, she famously opens that monologue with "we come to this place for magic." That line that is removed from this particular cut. A cut that she closes by saying "that's magic," thus referencing a phrase she didn't actually utter in this version of the video. This is lazy garbage that mars one of the most perfect pop culture objects of the decade.

Top Five Melr0210 Episodes

My marathon of Melrose Place and Beverly Hills, 90210 continues! I've buckled down a lot this year, because I wanted to finish all 11,000 episodes before I hit retirement age. So this will all come to a close in early 2025, but in the meantime, here are my five favorite episodes of either show that I watched this year.

#5 "Trojan Stork" Melrose Place season 6 episode 2

This is just good, solid, meat and potatoes 1990s prime time melodrama. Michael microwaves a floppy disk of evidence. Taylor tries to steal his sperm. Et cetera. You know, the usual.

#4 "Homecoming" Beverly Hills, 90210 season 7 episode 6

Seasons 6 and 7 clearly got a budget that was missing from the earlier and later seasons, and the use of wildfire stock footage here worked perfectly with the slightly grander-scale production of this episode, where a house party is interrupted by flames descending from the hills. Plus, Brad from Teen Witch is here, along with that inexplicably hot guy from Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror. A great time, all around.

#3 "You Say It's Your Birthday" Beverly Hills, 90210 season 6 episode 31/32

The season 6 finale takes some big swings! And I'm not just talking the cameos from Jim, Cindy, Andrea, and that unhinged Wings Hauser FBI character. There's a full-on San Pedro warehouse chase sequence that feels more Miami Vice than 90210, and it's a total blast.

#2 "Fiddling on the Roof" Melrose Place season 7 episode 15

Is there anything more Melrose Place than Jane and Michael getting married for the second time, deciding to get divorced at the reception, immediately cheating on each other, and having one crash through the ceiling onto the other, in the middle of said cheating? What a show.

#1 "Speechless" Beverly Hills, 90210 season 6 episode 6

Both of the main storylines here are full of wacky hijinks with the gang, which is a treat you can't overlook in these later seasons. Brandon loaning out his house to a film crew, only to realize that they're shooting Topless Pizza Party 3, is great. But the girls getting stuck at a convent where they have to take a vow of silence is even better.

2024 Crush: Cameron Bancroft