The must-see TV shows to look forward to in 2024
After protracted writers’ and actors’ strikes, the dust has settled for a compelling new year of television. Highlights include a season of True Detective led by Jodie Foster and the small-screen debut of Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón.
So here we are about to face another year of wonderful TV after a long period of industrial discontent and disorder. The writers’ and actors’ strikes destroyed much of the production year, but the streamers, who have completely transformed the way the industry operates, were largely unaffected. Streaming has taken over as the primary way the world watches television.
And it’s still a bit discombobulating to many of us who can still recall those hundreds of metal poles with branches and spokes in all directions beginning to spring up on the rooftops of our cities. Television, as it was called, so quickly dispelled its excitement by becoming so familiar so fast and we began to talk about cathode ray tubes, image orthicons and electron images, besotted with the magic lamp, as newspapers referred to it.
Television seems more and more like an object from another era in this time of convergence among different technologies and cultural forms. One thing is clear. To understand TV in this digital age you have to watch it and the coming year offers some great shows.
We’re promised HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, produced by Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as Danvers and Navarro, a couple of squabbling detectives on the hunt for a serial killer in Alaska. Hopefully it’s a series taking us back to Nick Pizzolatto’s brilliant original, featuring detectives emotionally involved in a complex process of changing implications in a case where everything keeps changing its meaning.
And from all accounts, it’s a story driven by the rhythm of exposure and the way that corruption is not isolated and specific but endemic to the social world of the narrative. The first series was called “an exercise in genre fused with existentialism” and that’s what we are hoping for again. The show’s teaser: “The night country. It takes us, one by one.”
Disclaimer is Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón’s first venture into the world of television for Apple, a psychological thriller based on the 2015 novel by Renee Knight and starring Cate Blanchett. Cuarón’s miniseries follows famed television journalist Catherine Ravenscroft, whose work has been built on revealing the concealed transgressions of long-respected institutions, who discovers she is a prominent character in a novel that reveals a secret she has tried to keep hidden for decades. Opening it, she is horrified to find she is reading about herself, Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen play the parents of Kodi Smit-McPhee. It’s Cuarón’s first project since 2018’s Oscar-winning Roma.
And Robert De Niro is apparently leading a new thriller series for Netflix called Zero Day, his first as a TV leading character, playing in fact a former President investigating some kind of worldwide conspiracy. Joining him on the cast are Lizzy Caplan and Jesse Plemons – and White Lotus star Connie Britton as his former chief of staff.
It’s created, executive produced and written by Eric Newman (Narcos) and Noah Oppenheim (The Maze Runner), with the story coming from Newman, with Homeland’s Leslie Linka Glatter directing.
All we know comes from a rather obtuse release from Netflix: “How do we find truth in a world in crisis, one seemingly being torn apart by forces outside our control? And in an era rife with conspiracy theory and subterfuge, how much of those forces are products of our own doing, perhaps even of our own imagining?”
I love the sound of Griselda, too, the dramatised story of South Florida’s most notorious drug lord, and her penchant for disposing of ex-lovers. Created by the makers of Narcos and Painkiller for Netflix, the series stars Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara as Griselda Blanco aka Black Widow and Cocaine Grandmother. Behind the camera is filmmaker Andrés Baiz, who kinetically directed episodes of Narcos, Narcos: Mexico and The Sandman. Expect a high-octane drama full of action movie fireworks, set-piece escapes and gunfights, a stylish orchestration of special effects, stunt work and fluid camera skills.
Talk is big for Apple’s Masters of the Air, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, the war drama miniseries focused on the “Bloody Hundredth” – a bombardment group who earned their tragic nickname due to the heavy losses they incurred in WWII combat missions. In the first trailer the bomber boys howl as they take to the skies and “bring the war to Hitler’s doorstep.” Graham Yost, the creator of Justified, penned the screenplay for the series – which stars Austin Butler (the 2022 Elvis biopic) – alongside John Orloff (Band of Brothers).
The awkwardly titled 3 Body Problem is one of the more intriguing Netflix projects on the horizon, a science fiction series from Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The series is based on the best-selling book series “The Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu, and tells a sprawling, multi-generational story that spans the cosmos.
Netflix says it’s about how a young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across space and time into the present day. “When the laws of nature inexplicably unravel before their eyes, a close-knit group of brilliant scientists join forces with an unflinching detective to confront the greatest threat in humanity’s history.”
The Regime sees the return of Kate Winslet in another HBO series, this time set in a fictional authoritarian country, the Oscar-winner going from small-town detective to Madame Chancellor. The series is directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons) and Jessica Hobbs (The Crown), and written by Will Tracy, who co-wrote The Menu and episodes of Succession. Winslet, Frears, and Tracy are also executive producing, along with Frank Rich (Succession) and Tracey Seaward (The Queen). Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton, and Hugh Grant also star. This one has class written all over it.
And of course, there must be yet another Yellowstone spin-off from the Dutton ranch created by Taylor Sheridan. 6666 it seems is about another ranch, founded when the Comanches still ruled West Texas but set in the present. It’s a kind of mythological place we’re told “synonymous with the merciless Endeavour to raise the finest horses and livestock in the world.”
We’ve already had 1883, which premiered on Paramount in 2021, a huge hit, and 1923, the second successful prequel, but there’s little information so far on “the four sixes.” What we can expect though is another Sheridan vision of a fantasy reflecting a profound disbelief in the modern agencies of law and justice to serve their righteous function.
The Penguin is from HBO, Colin Farrell in the prosthetics once again as Gotham’s greatest crime lord from 2022’s The Batman, aka Oswald Cobblepot. The creator, showrunner, and writer is Lauren LeFranc, who’s best known for her previous work on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Executive producer Matt Reeves, director of the original movie, says The Penguin will explore Oz’s crime-filled rise to power after the death of his boss in The Batman.
“The idea of getting to do the series and really sort of dive into the depths of who this character is and look at that moment where it’s kind of his Scarface moment,” Reeves says. His film was brilliant, impressionist, and harrowing and this series should be just as viscerally compelling, a deep dive into the dark corners of Gotham’s organised crime syndicates promised.
I’m looking forward to the rather eccentric sounding Monsieur Spade, in which Clive Owen reinvents Dashiell Hammett’s wisecracking private investigator Sam Spade. He’s forced out of a quiet retirement during 1963 in the South of France and is back on the case to solve murders in his inimitable fashion. The six-episode drama is co-created, written and executive produced by Emmy winner Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit), who also serves as director.
Hopefully we’ll see our hard-boiled knight errant confront, expose and destroy another web of conspiracy and perversion with the right generic number of quips.
And Disney has just released details of the imminent Shogun, an original adaptation of James Clavell’s best-selling novel, set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a century-defining civil war. The 10-episode series features an almost all Japanese cast and is described as Game of Thrones in feudal Japan.
The series we’re told follows the collision course of two ambitious men from completely different worlds and a mysterious female samurai, the story loosely based on the real exploits of William Adams, an English navigator known in Japan as “Miura Anjin”.
So much to look forward to; anyone who says they don’t want to watch TV, or don’t need to, is either lying or deluding themselves.