Baby Reindeer is the best Netflix TV show of 2024. Richard Gadd’s seven-episode limited series is emotionally difficult, formally inventive, and far more psychologically complicated than its stalking premise suggests. It is followed closely by Ripley, Arcane season 2, and the unusually rewatchable romantic comedy Nobody Wants This.
This is an editorial ranking of the best Netflix series released or returning in the United States between January 1 and December 31, 2024—not Netflix’s official popularity chart. The list weighs critical reception, writing, performances, direction, visual distinction, cultural impact, and how satisfying each 2024 season is as a viewing experience.
The 10 best Netflix shows of 2024
Netflix’s 2024 lineup moved from psychologically bruising prestige drama to glossy romance, ambitious science fiction, spectacular animation, and broad comedy. The shows below are ranked for artistic achievement and overall recommendation value, not simply for how many people watched them.
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Baby Reindeer
Best for: Viewers who want challenging, psychologically complex drama.
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Based on the true story behind Richard Gadd’s one-man play, Baby Reindeer begins with a stalking story and gradually turns it into something more uncomfortable and less predictable. The series is interested not only in the stalker, but also in trauma, shame, complicity, memory, and the ways people try to understand experiences that have changed them.
Gadd’s performance gives the series its unstable center, while the seven-episode structure allows the story to keep complicating its own premise. It is not a conventional cat-and-mouse thriller in which the audience is given a simple hero and villain. That moral and emotional messiness is precisely why it stands above the rest of Netflix’s 2024 slate.
At the research snapshot, Baby Reindeer held a 99% Tomatometer score from 69 critics, and The Guardian placed it second in its overall television ranking for 2024. Those numbers do not capture everything that makes the show effective, but they reflect its unusual combination of critical acclaim, strong performances, and formal ambition.
Content warning: The series includes stalking, sexual violence, trauma, and disturbing material. It is an excellent recommendation for the right viewer, but not a casual or low-stress watch.
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Ripley
Best for: Patient viewers who value atmosphere, composition, and moral tension.
Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley material is a slow, austere crime drama built around Andrew Scott’s controlled performance. Its black-and-white cinematography gives nearly every location an unnerving elegance, turning the story’s con-artist trajectory into a study of surfaces, deception, and social aspiration.
Ripley demands more patience than most Netflix thrillers. It is deliberate rather than frantic, and its pleasures come from visual detail, careful staging, and the gradual tightening of moral pressure. That pace may make it less immediately accessible than Baby Reindeer, but its craft and consistency earn it the number-two spot.
Readers interested in comparing the adaptation with its source can also pick up Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. The novel is an optional companion, not required preparation for the series.
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Arcane: League of Legends — Season 2
Best for: Viewers seeking extraordinary animation, fantasy action, and emotional scale.
The second and final season of Arcane closes the central Vi-and-Jinx story with some of the most ambitious animation Netflix offered in 2024. Fortiche and Riot Games deliver a world that remains visually dense and inventive, with action sequences, music-driven presentation, and production design that frequently approaches the impact of a series of short films.
Netflix’s animated fantasy is not ranked higher only because its storytelling can feel compressed as it brings a large saga to its conclusion. The season is still a remarkable achievement: emotionally intense, visually distinctive, and unusually successful at making a franchise-based story feel authored rather than manufactured.
Rank #2
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At the research snapshot, season 2 held a 100% Tomatometer score from 35 critics. For viewers who prioritize animation, world-building, fantasy, or kinetic action over live-action drama, this is arguably the strongest recommendation on the entire list.
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Nobody Wants This
Best for: Viewers looking for a warm, funny, genuinely rewatchable romantic comedy.
Erin Foster’s Nobody Wants This fills a gap that streaming television often leaves open: an adult romantic comedy with an appealing central pairing and enough warmth to reward a second viewing. Kristen Bell plays an agnostic sex podcaster, while Adam Brody plays a newly single rabbi. Their relationship is complicated by family expectations, religious differences, and the practical difficulties of building a life across incompatible backgrounds.
The premise gives the show more substance than a routine workplace or dating comedy, but the series does not forget to be funny. Bell and Brody provide the necessary chemistry, and the ensemble helps keep the story from becoming only a two-person debate about faith and family.
It is less formally ambitious than the three shows above it, but that is not its goal. Its achievement is tonal: it is smart enough to have something to say about interfaith relationships while remaining easy to enjoy. The first season held a 95% Tomatometer score at the research snapshot.
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3 Body Problem
Best for: Viewers who want high-concept science fiction, mystery, and international scope.
David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo’s adaptation of Liu Cixin’s novel is Netflix’s most consequential science-fiction launch of 2024. Its eight-episode story moves between the Cultural Revolution in China, Oxford, and the United Nations, giving the series a scale that extends well beyond a single laboratory or spaceship.
The show’s strongest quality is its ability to make abstract scientific ideas feel dramatically urgent. It combines mystery, philosophical questions, global stakes, and a steadily expanding sense of danger. It is also a series about discovery: viewers are often learning what is happening at the same time as the characters.
The limitation is structural. Season 1 is more compelling as setup for a larger story than as a fully resolved dramatic unit. That keeps it below the more complete recommendations above, but it remains essential viewing for science-fiction fans and a strong example of Netflix attempting ambitious, internationally scaled genre television.
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The Gentlemen
Best for: A brisk, stylish crime binge with dark comedy.
Rank #3
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Guy Ritchie’s series expands the world of his 2019 film into a story about inherited wealth, aristocratic property, and organized crime. Its central pleasure is the collision between privileged English institutions and the criminal networks operating around them.
The Gentlemen is not as thematically deep as the five shows above it, but it is confident about what it wants to be. The pace is efficient, the tone is glossy and mischievous, and the series offers one of Netflix’s most dependable pure-entertainment binges of the year. It was also among the platform’s Emmy-recognized 2024 programs, reinforcing its place as more than a disposable genre exercise.
Special offer. See more information about Outbyte and uninstall instructions. Please review EULA and Privacy policy.Choose this one when you want sharp suits, criminal schemes, comic violence, and momentum rather than a heavy emotional commitment.
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One Day
Best for: Viewers who prefer intimate relationship drama built over time.
This adaptation of David Nicholls’s novel follows Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew across many years, returning to their relationship at recurring points in their lives. The structure lets the emotional effect accumulate through ordinary conversations, missed opportunities, changing ambitions, and the gradual difference between who people are together and who they become apart.
The series succeeds because it allows a relationship to evolve through small moments rather than relying only on major plot turns. The leads have persuasive chemistry, and the passage of time gives the drama a feeling of emotional accumulation. It is one of Netflix’s most affecting relationship series of 2024.
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Special offer. See more information about Outbyte and uninstall instructions. Please review EULA and Privacy policy.It ranks below the first six partly because its appeal is narrower and the source material is already familiar to many viewers. For anyone receptive to romantic drama, however, One Day is a carefully structured and often moving recommendation.
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The Diplomat — Season 2
Best for: Viewers who want fast-moving political intrigue and cliffhangers.
Keri Russell remains the driving force in season 2 of this geopolitical thriller. The show combines diplomatic maneuvering with personal conflict, creating tension both in international negotiations and in the relationships among the people conducting them.
The second season is more continuation than reinvention, so it does not have the same element of surprise as the first. It is nevertheless highly efficient serialized drama: brisk, sharply performed, and designed to keep the viewer moving from one complication to the next.
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The Diplomat is the right choice for viewers who want politics with a strong thriller engine. It is less interested in quiet observation than Ripley or One Day, but it delivers momentum and a reliable supply of consequential reversals.
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A Man on the Inside
Best for: A gentle mystery with warmth, humor, and broad appeal.
Ted Danson stars as a retired professor recruited to investigate a mystery in a retirement community. The result is Netflix’s most comforting recommendation on this list: a light investigation wrapped around a humane story about aging, community, loneliness, and the possibility of finding a new purpose later in life.
A Man on the Inside is not as formally daring as the higher-ranked shows, and its mystery is not designed to overwhelm the character work. That restraint is part of its appeal. Danson’s warmth gives the series an inviting center, while the retirement-community setting allows the comedy-drama to treat older characters as full participants in an active social world rather than as background figures.
Special offer. See more information about Outbyte and uninstall instructions. Please review EULA and Privacy policy.It is the best pick here for viewers who want a low-stress watch, and it gives the ranking a needed alternative to the darker material at the top.
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Squid Game — Season 2
Best for: Viewers who want a major global television event and a familiar high-stakes premise.
Season 2 does not reproduce the shock of the original Squid Game, but it remains a major international release with a powerful built-in premise and enormous audience reach. Its place at number ten is not a dismissal of its importance; it reflects the fact that the 2024 season feels shorter and more transitional than the completed or more self-contained seasons ranked above it.
Netflix’s Top 10 reporting placed season 2 at number one on the non-English television list during the week of December 30, 2024, recording 58.2 million views and a Top 10 appearance in 93 countries. Those figures demonstrate reach, not artistic superiority, which is why popularity is treated as context rather than as the ranking’s deciding factor.
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How to choose your next Netflix show
| If you want… | Start with… | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The strongest overall drama | Baby Reindeer | Psychologically difficult, formally ambitious, and emotionally complex. |
| Elegant crime television | Ripley | Slow-burn tension, Andrew Scott’s performance, and stark black-and-white imagery. |
| The best animation | Arcane season 2 | Exceptional visual design and a large emotional payoff. |
| A romantic comedy | Nobody Wants This | Strong chemistry, sharp comic timing, and an interfaith relationship premise. |
| Ambitious science fiction | 3 Body Problem | International scale, scientific mystery, and high-concept stakes. |
| A light, comforting watch | A Man on the Inside | Ted Danson’s warmth and a gentle retirement-community mystery. |
| A fast political thriller | The Diplomat season 2 | Diplomatic maneuvering, personal stakes, and cliffhanger-driven plotting. |
How this ranking was made
The ranking separates quality from popularity. Critical response and professional year-end recognition receive the greatest weight, followed by writing, direction, performances, visual or formal distinction, cultural impact, and the completeness of each 2024 season. Audience reach matters, but Netflix viewing figures measure engagement rather than artistic quality.
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That distinction explains why Squid Game season 2 is included but placed tenth despite its enormous global audience, while a less widely watched series such as Ripley can rank near the top. It also explains why Baby Reindeer leads the list even though it is a difficult limited series rather than a broad four-quadrant hit.
The scope is scripted television released or returning on Netflix in the United States from January 1 through December 31, 2024. It includes drama, comedy, animation, science fiction, romance, and crime. It excludes films, specials, reality competitions, and documentaries. Netflix’s catalog rights and regional availability can change after the original release year, so viewers should check the current Netflix U.S. listing before planning a watch.
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If you only watch three
Start with Baby Reindeer for the year’s most distinctive drama, Ripley for controlled visual craft and slow-burn crime, and Arcane season 2 for animation that reaches feature-film levels of ambition. Replace any of those with Nobody Wants This if what you actually want is warmth, chemistry, and something easier to revisit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Netflix’s official ranking of its best shows?
No. This is an editorial ranking for U.S. viewers. It weighs critical reception, craft, performances, cultural impact, and how satisfying each 2024 season is. Netflix’s Top 10 and engagement figures are used only as context, not as a quality score.
Why is Squid Game season 2 ranked below less popular shows?
Its audience reach was enormous, but popularity and artistic achievement are different measures. Season 2 remains an important global event, yet its 2024 run feels more transitional and less self-contained than the seasons ranked above it.
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Which show on the list is easiest to watch?
A Man on the Inside is the gentlest choice, with a low-stress mystery and a warm view of aging. Nobody Wants This is another accessible option if you want a romantic comedy. Baby Reindeer, by contrast, includes stalking, sexual violence, trauma, and disturbing material.
Are all ten shows still available on Netflix?
Availability can vary by country and can change after a series’ original release. This ranking is framed for the United States, so check the current Netflix U.S. catalog before watching.
The Bottom Line
Bottom line: Baby Reindeer is Netflix’s best 2024 show overall, with Ripley close behind for viewers who prefer immaculate slow-burn crime drama. Arcane season 2 is the standout animation, Nobody Wants This is the best romantic comedy, and A Man on the Inside is the safest choice for a comforting evening watch.
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