Best TV Episodes of 2024

Abbott just keeps chugging along, not only maintaining the mockumentary tradition of The Office and Parks and Recreation, but providing one of the few reasons to keep returning to traditional broadcast TV. “Willard R. Abbott” neatly captures what makes the sitcom such a treat, and not just because it opens with yet another cameo by a famous Philadelphian, in this case Bradley Cooper (returning to the network where he once played Will Tippin on Alias). When Janine (creator and star Quinta Brunson) and her fellow teachers discover that the school’s namesake was a racist who helped keep Philly segregated for decades, they have to scramble to reshape a ceremony designed to honor this villain. Like much of Abbott, it’s thoughtful and funny, but also realistic about what even the most enthusiastic idealist can accomplish within a deeply flawed system. 

Where many of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV shows have essentially been bloated movies broken up into chapters, the WandaVision spinoff Agatha All Along was, like its predecessor, explicitly designed as a TV show, with distinct conflicts and styles for each episode. The best of these was a spotlight on the witch Lilia (played by the great Patti LuPone), who experiences time out of order. Non-chronological storytelling is a hard thing for television to make both comprehensible and interesting, but “Death’s Hand in Mine” did it with clarity and power.

Where much of The Bear Season Three seemed high on its own supply, this flashback episode about how Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) came to work at The Original Beef of Chicagoland evoked everything that was so magnificent about the show’s first two years. In particular, the 10-minute sequence where Tina meets Mikey (Jon Bernthal) at a particularly low moment in her life was a marvelous object lesson in how to generate enormous emotion out of simple conversation. 

It’s been more than six months since the beloved family cartoon out of Australia dropped this supersized episode — wherein the Heelers seem on the verge of leaving Brisbane, much to the horror of little Bluey and Bingo — and we still don’t know if the series will continue in some form. “The Sign” wasn’t just big in length, but in its emotions, particularly in the climactic scene where Bandit was forced to reconsider whether he wanted to uproot his daughters’ lives. A show made for small children that made grown adults across the globe weep.

The acidic Australian rom-com had several strong contenders for this list, including an episode chronicling two very different experiences on the same night for lovers Gordon (Patrick Brammall) and Ashley (Harriet Dyer). The pick here is the ribald, hilarious “Ethical Porn,” where the duo keep running into sex-related misfortune: Ashley’s bluetooth earbuds pick up the soundtrack for Gordon’s latest self-gratification session, Ashley accidentally molests an elderly patient at the hospital where she works, and a flustered Gordon has to defend his adult video preferences in front of Ashley and her friends.

The Paramount+ drama about a trio of Catholic church contractors investigating reports of possession and other demonic doings died as it lived: surprising, strange, and wickedly funny. Among the highlights of its fourth and final season was this story of the assessors looking into an AI company that has built a chatbot purporting to allow the living to speak to the dead. Evil tended to be at its best in depicting the ways technology could be used to create the sensation of hell on Earth, and this was a memorably weird and fun example of that.

Only two episodes of the anthology drama’s fifth season debuted in 2024. Fortunately, one of them was one of the best episodes of TV ever made. “Bisquik” features an incredible final scene where resourceful Dot (Juno Temple) neutralizes the relentless Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) not through violence, but love, convincing the former sin-eater to try making a meal with her and her family rather than seeking a piece of revenge he isn’t even really owed. It is the thematic culmination not only of Fargo Season Five, but of everything Noah Hawley has been doing with this improbably great show for a decade now.

Donald Glover’s reimagining of the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie movie, starring Glover and Maya Erskine as spies-for-hire posing as a married couple, was a binge release for Prime. Yet even though we got all the episodes at once, Glover and co-creator Francesca Sloane very effectively used a case-of-the-week structure for each episode, so we could see Glover and Erskine’s relationship get messier and messier within the context of individual assignments that were satisfyingly resolved within each hour. The most effective balancing of the two ideas came midway through the season, when “John” and “Jane” are sent to Italy to protect a criminal (guest star Ron Perlman) from waves of assassins, even as Jane gets upset to learn that John bought them a house without asking her first. A splendid mix of slick action and relationship comedy.

Pachinko usually uses historical events in mid-20th century Korea and Japan as a backdrop to the drama specific to its multigeneral family epic. Every now and then, though, its characters get more directly caught up in the things we learn about in school. A devastating case in point was this episode, which opens with an extended black-and-white prologue set in Nagasaki in the days leading up to America dropping an atomic bomb on the city, while Yoseb (Junwoo Han) is forced to labor in a factory there.

So many series in the wake of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad have devoted episodes to characters having to dispose of inconvenient corpses, the idea quickly became the most worn-out of clichés. Then came this episode of Ripley, which got so granular in showing every step its title character (Andrew Scott) took in trying to get rid of the body of his frenemy Dickie (Johnny Flynn), this creaky old trope felt incredibly fresh and new again.