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.

Our latest update added House of the Dragon.

House of the Dragon season 2

Where to watch: Max

In many ways, the second season of House of the Dragon picked up where the first left off: Rich characters, intense political drama, moments of excitement, tension, and terror, and a whole bunch of dragons. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little let down by the ending, which teased a third season more than it closed a second one. There have been reports that the initial plan was for 10 episodes before being shortened to eight. If that’s the case, that was certainly felt by the season’s abrupt montage ending.

But House of the Dragon remains one of the best shows on television because of its strong writing, acting, and attention to detail. The cast continues to expand and add engaging new stars, the family drama continues to be compelling, and the show’s design of Westerosi castles and halls remains unmatched. The second season also thrived on the ways it weaved the smallfolk into its story, gamely questioning the myth of Targaryen invulnerability and bringing more perspectives from outside the ruling class into the fold. The finale’s ending may not have been fully satisfying, but it has set up one hell of a season 3, and there was a lot of fun to be had along the way. —Pete Volk

My Adventures with Superman season 2

Where to watch: Max

Image: Warner Media

Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen’s anime-ass adventures have built off a strong first season and continues to be one of the best screen Superman adaptations ever. It challenges expectations of what Superman can be, knows when to tug at the heartstrings, and looks really good while doing it.

The clear anime influences on the show paid off in this season’s stellar action sequences in particular, including a reference to the Itano Circus and a few magical girl-esque costume transformations. But at its heart, My Adventures with Superman is about the core friendship between Clark, Lois, and Jimmy – even the title of the show comes from Lois and Jimmy’s perspective.

This second season also brought Supergirl into the fold, with a different angle on her character than most screen adaptations, focusing on how someone can be brainwashed into serving a tyrannical government. And the casting of Professional Bad Guy Michael Emerson as the voice of Brainiac is a particularly inspired choice. My Adventures with Superman continues to soar up, up, and away from much of its superpowered competition. –PV

Doctor Who

Where to watch: Disney Plus

Image: BBC/Disney

Russell T. Davies returned to Doctor Who this year and showed that he’s still got it. With the electric new energy of Ncuti Gatwa’s young, fashionable, pansexual 15th Doctor and the gung-ho chemistry of Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday as companion, the TARDIS practically vibrated with joy.

That positivity was a good offset to one-and-done episodes like “Boom” and “73 Yards,” both of which sit at the apex of Doctor Who’s reputation for tension and horror, and mind-bending adventures like “The Devil’s Chord” or “Dot and Bubble.” Davies knows that a great season of Doctor Who plays with as many emotions as possible as boldly as possible, and with his inaugural season, Gatwa has proven that he has the range. —Susana Polo

Game Changer season 6

Where to watch: Dropout

Image: Dropout

Game Changer, self-described as “the only game show where the game changes every show,” has a certain evolutionary nature baked into its concept, but the show’s sixth season has been marked by a quieter kind of escalation, though no less significant.

The biggest change to season 6’s games has been behind the camera, as Dropout’s production crew leveled up in scope and aptitude in a way that’s paid immediate dividends.

Editor Sam Geer, promoted to director starting this season, has overseen some of the series’ most logistically impressive episodes. “Bingo,” “Deja Vu,” “Beat the Buzzer,” and the two-part “Ratfish” finale have broken bad from the show’s podium format for games of greater scope in setting and simultaneity — while the editing of all that footage has pushed already unpredictable performances into expertly presented comedy. —Susana Polo

Delicious in Dungeon

Where to watch: Netflix

Image: Studio Trigger/Netflix

Adapted by Studio Trigger (Promare, Kill la Kill) from the manga by Ryoko Kui, Delicious in Dungeon’s basic premise sells it short. Nominally, it’s an action-comedy-cooking series about a group of dungeon explorers who are short on funds, and resort to cooking the monsters they kill into gourmet meals. Each episode features lessons about the endless dungeon, its monsters, and the delicious-looking food you can, unexpectedly, make from them.

Our heroes’ goal is to kill the Red Dragon and cut their fallen comrade from its belly, but just as the cooking manga rhythm starts to feel comfortable, Kui gathers all her foreshadowed threads in a rug pull for the ages. If Delicious in Dungeon is about much more than eating, it’s only because we rarely take the time to contemplate all the meaning imbued in that primal act. We must destroy to consume, says Delicious in Dungeon, but we must consume to live. We live for the people we love, but to care for others we must care for ourselves. If we are what we eat, then what we eat is what we are, and we must love it in turn. —SP

Hacks season 3

Where to watch: Max

Photo: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Max

Hacks has always had a nasty (complimentary) streak underpinning its comedy. The whole conceit of the show was that two comedians — one, the glamorous veteran, the other, a canceled up-and-comer — find a kinship in each other. Season 3 leans into the camaraderie more than the causticity of their relationship, with Ava (Hannah Einbinder) eager to help Deborah’s (Jean Smart) dream of hosting a late-night show. But what makes Hacks season 3 so special is the way it keeps the bite in all the sarcasm leveled between the duo. These birds of a feather flopped then flew together for a reason, and it’s more than just how seriously they take their work. The season 3 finale twists the knife, cutting a new path and bringing the two closer together than ever. Here’s to the next hack! —Zosha Millman

Under the Bridge

Where to watch: Hulu

Photo: Darko Sikman/Hulu

“Ripped from the headlines true crime” is a common enough phrase these days that the shock of it has worn off in most places. Many shows pull their ideas from real-life horrors, reframing them with fictional detectives or the Hollywood treatment in order to “take them seriously.” Under the Bridge is bred from the same stock, following the grisly murder of a teenage girl in 1990s Canada — but it serves as a firm backstop to those other stories.

It’s got all the hallmarks of the genre (an ambling lead with their own trauma; the criminal’s perspective; a struggling cop with something to prove). But months after its conclusion, the heart, soul, and dimension it gives Reena (a marvelous Vritika Gupta), the victim in question, radiates out to the rest of the show. It’s an act of love to show her life, in all its imperfections. And in doing so, Under the Bridge treats the material with more than seriousness: it treats it with caring reverence. —ZM

Elsbeth

Where to watch: Paramount Plus

Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/CBS

It’s a long wait between seasons of Poker Face. Luckily, Elsbeth is here to provide some more howcatchem goodness.

A spinoff focused on the beloved quirky lawyer from The Good Wife and The Good Fight, Elsbeth is the latest winner from showrunners Robert and Michelle King, who have also been killing it this year with Evil. Carrie Preston returns as Elsbeth Tascioni, now monitoring an NYPD precinct under investigation. She takes on the role of pseudo homicide detective after her Very Particular Set of Skills puts her in a great position to annoy killers into slipping up or confessing.

Preston is fantastic as usual as the singular Elsbeth, all eccentricities and tote bags but always the smartest person in the room. And as with any good howcatchem, Elsbeth season 1 features a great slate of guest stars: Jane Krakowski, Retta, Blair Underwood, and Gina Gershon, to name a few. The show may not reinvent the genre or reach the high heights of Poker Face or Columbo, but it’s light, fluffy television at its best. —PV

Sugar

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

Image: Apple TV Plus

Perhaps you have heard all is not what it seems when it comes to Sugar, Apple TV Plus’ seemingly run-of-the-mill homage to film noir detective stories. Don’t investigate further — just dive right in. On its own, Mark Protosevich’s slow-burn mystery following private eye John Sugar is pretty satisfying for those that enjoy the genre in its most relaxed mode. You know: A guy takes a case he probably shouldn’t, drives around town asking questions he doesn’t fully appreciate the gravity of, starts caring for people he’d best stay away from. That alone is very fun. But Sugar has another layer to it that is perhaps the most divisive TV twist of the year, and even if you end up hostile to this twist, discussing it with a friend (you ought to watch with someone else) might make for one of the most memorable TV experiences you can have in 2024. —Joshua Rivera

Outer Range season 2

Where to watch: Prime Video

Image: Prime Video

The easiest description for Prime Video’s Outer Range is probably something like “Yellowstone by way of Twin Peaks.” But even that can’t fully convey the alluring strangeness of one of the most slept-on family dramas of the past few years – a true casualty of the overload of television streaming has brought to us.

Outer Range follows the Abbott family, ranchers in Wyoming dealing with normal family drama, rowdy rich neighbors, and also a giant mysterious hole on their property. Where the first season introduced us to both these conflicts and characters and let us watch as the family disintegrated, the second smartly inverts much of that format, following the Abbotts picking up the pieces of the first season and trying to put it all back together.

Series creator Brian Watkins brought together a fantastic group of fellow playwrights into the writer’s room, and it shows in the structure and strong dialogue. It’s also aided by an excellent cast – yes, Josh Brolin is terrific as the patriarch Royal, but it’s winners all the way down: Lili Taylor, Tamara Podemski, Imogen Poots, Will Patton, and the rest of the expansive cast all excel and build out real characters in this larger-than-life setting.

The show has been canceled after two seasons, which is a shame, because there were plenty of threads still left to tug on. But what we got in those two seasons was fascinating, and well worth catching up on. —PV

X-Men ’97

Where to watch: Disney Plus

Image: Marvel Animation

It pisses me off how good X-Men ’97 is. I’m supposed to be above this sort of open nostalgia bait, you know? A revival of a beloved childhood cartoon, faithful to the original’s tone but aimed squarely at its now adult fans — what a nakedly commercial play. What a cynical way to mine Disney Plus subscriptions. What a great fucking season of television.

At every step of the way, X-Men ’97 rose above its nostalgic roots to deliver a show that smartly and subtly updated its kids’ TV metaphor, deepening its characters, complicating their mission, and wrestling with how the world has changed despite its mission to pick things up immediately after the ’90s series ended. It did all that while also looking very good, and not being above the fan service-y desire to see the ’90s X-Men kick ass without ’90s limitations (though with some of its charming foibles, like its inability to sit with a story beat more than about a minute). It could’ve just been a sequel, but instead X-Men ’97 is something better: a stand-alone argument for why the mutant metaphor is still potent today. —JR

Dead Boy Detectives

Where to watch: Netflix

Photo: David Bukach/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

Photo: Katie Yu

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

Photo: Ed Miller/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

Photo: JoJo Whilden/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

Photo: Miya Mizuno/HBO

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 season 2

Where to watch: Netflix

Image: 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

Image: Apple Originals

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 season 3

Photo: Emily V. Aragones/ Netflix

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

Iwájú

Image: Walt Disney Animation

Where to watch: Disney Plus

Pan-African studio Kugali’s long-awaited partnership with Disney absolutely delivered. In just six half-hour episodes, Iwájú presents a complicated and moving story about class differences in a futuristic Lagos. It’s incredibly ambitious, and pulled off in such a short episode order. The story centers on Tola (Simisola Gbadamosi), a privileged yet lonely young girl, and Kole (Siji Soetan), the clever boy who works for her father. But Iwájú expands the story beyond those two, weaving in intricate backstories for most of the cast and fleshing out the world-building. It does so much in such little time and is truly one of the best Disney Plus original shows in a long time. —PR

God Save Texas

Where to watch: Max

Image: HBO

In a country as vast and varied as the United States, regions are often characterized by their loudest, most powerful actors: the politicians and profiteers that co-opt the story of a city or state to make their own, cutting out swaths of lived experience as a result. Consider the tech barons of Silicon Valley, or the bluster of Bible Belt politicians, who feed into stereotypes and benefit from the ignorance they cultivate. Works like God Save Texas are a corrective to that, taking a more considered lens to one of our largest regions that bears the weight of some of those biggest stereotypes.

A trio of documentary features from Texan filmmakers that each focus on their personal connections with the state, God Save Texas feels like a humane and intimate corrective to popular narratives surrounding the Lone Star State. Richard Linklater ruminates on his hometown’s prison economy. Alex Stapleton returns to her Houston suburb for an examination of the city’s overwhelming energy industry, and how it’s encroached on, exploited, and sickened its Black population. And Iliana Sosa examines the border town of El Paso in the wake of the town’s 2019 shooting to consider the nation’s relationship with immigrants.

Like another docuseries, Starz’s America to Me, which focused on a year at a single Illinois high school, God Save Texas argues that the best way to understand a country this immeasurably diverse is to make it smaller, to learn what it’s like to engage with it on narrower and narrower levels. There’ll never be an end to the work under that approach, but why should there be? —JR

The Floor

Image: Fox

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

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

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

Photo: David Lee/Prime Video

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

Image: Netflix

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

Image: Ludo Studios

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

Pokémon Concierge

Image: dwarf studios/Netflix

Where to watch: Netflix

This one technically came out in late 2023, but too late for us to consider for that year’s list. 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