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Shōgun is the best TV show of 2024 overall. It combines formal precision, historical scale, Japanese perspective, political suspense, and exceptional performances from Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai. The rest of this ranked list follows with Baby Reindeer, Slow Horses season 4, Hacks season 3, Pachinko season 2, and five other standout series, using critic consensus, awards, originality, cultural significance, and season-level achievement rather than treating the word best as an objective measurement.
How this ranking was made
There is no laboratory test for the best television show. This list is an editorial synthesis of professional-critic consensus, major awards, season-level achievement, originality, cultural significance, and range. It also deliberately balances prestige drama with comedy, limited series, animation, international storytelling, and genre television.
For a critic-consensus check, Metacritic’s 2024 television table is useful because it aggregates professional reviews and excludes programs with fewer than seven reviews. Year-end judgments from TV Guide, TV Insider, and Rotten Tomatoes provide a broader editorial comparison. Awards matter, but they are not the entire ranking: a show can be technically impressive, culturally important, or unusually original without winning the biggest prize.
The 10 best TV shows of 2024, ranked
| Rank | Show | Format | Best reason to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shōgun | Historical drama | Political suspense, perspective, performances, and formal precision |
| 2 | Baby Reindeer | Limited series | A disturbing, formally daring examination of obsession and trauma |
| 3 | Slow Horses season 4 | Spy dramedy | Character-driven espionage with humor and real emotional stakes |
| 4 | Hacks season 3 | Comedy | A sharp show-business story about ambition, age, and reinvention |
| 5 | Pachinko season 2 | Historical family saga | Generational storytelling on an intimate and epic scale |
| 6 | Say Nothing | Historical limited series | A shifting, mournful account of political violence and memory |
| 7 | Industry season 3 | Workplace drama | High-pressure television about money, class, power, and identity |
| 8 | Fantasmas | Surreal comedy | Singular visual invention and wonderfully strange observations |
| 9 | The Bear season 3 | Comedy-drama | Exceptional craft and performances, despite a more divisive structure |
| 10 | X-Men ’97 | Animated superhero drama | Serialized melodrama, political allegory, and consequential emotion |
1. Shōgun
Why it is number one: Shōgun is the most complete television achievement of 2024. FX’s adaptation of James Clavell’s novel combines the scale of historical spectacle with the control of chamber drama. Its political maneuvering is legible without being simplistic; its battles and ceremonies have weight; and its performances make every alliance, silence, and apparent act of courtesy feel potentially dangerous.
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The crucial creative decision is one of perspective. The series does not treat the stranded English sailor John Blackthorne as the unquestioned center of Japan’s story. Japanese characters, institutions, language, ritual, and political priorities occupy the foreground. Translation is not merely a practical obstacle: it becomes part of the suspense. A pause, an omitted word, or a deliberately softened translation can alter the balance of power.
Hiroyuki Sanada gives Lord Yoshii Toranaga an almost unnerving patience, while Anna Sawai’s Lady Toda Mariko brings intelligence, faith, grief, and political discipline into the same performance. The show’s achievement is not just that it looks expensive. It understands that historical drama becomes gripping when systems of power are expressed through individual behavior.
The awards case confirms the wider critical judgment. The Television Academy’s 76th Emmy results record wins for Outstanding Drama Series, lead acting for Sanada and Sawai, directing, and 18 Emmys overall in that cycle—a record for a drama series at the time. Those awards support the ranking, but the stronger argument is the show’s precision: it makes political history feel immediate without flattening the culture it depicts.
Best for: Viewers who want prestige drama with genuine political suspense, historical scale, and a serious commitment to language and point of view.
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2. Baby Reindeer
Why it ranks this high: Richard Gadd’s seven-episode Netflix limited series is difficult television in the best and most literal sense. It begins with a struggling comedian showing kindness to a vulnerable woman, then follows that interaction into obsession, stalking, shame, and trauma. The premise is recognizable as a thriller, but the series keeps unsettling the expected moral categories.
Netflix describes Baby Reindeer as the story of a struggling comedian whose act of kindness develops into a destructive obsession. Gadd’s writing and performance make the show more complicated than a simple victim-versus-villain narrative. The central character’s decisions, evasions, vulnerabilities, and self-deceptions matter, even when the surrounding behavior becomes frightening. The result is a show about how people can participate in the stories they tell about their own suffering without making that suffering unreal.
Its form changes with its emotional subject. Episodes can feel like black comedy, psychological thriller, confession, performance piece, or trauma drama. That instability is part of the point, although it can also make the series uncomfortable and uneven for viewers expecting a conventional stalking story.
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The awards recognition was unusually strong for such a personal and difficult work. According to the Television Academy’s Emmy results, the series won Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, with additional wins for Gadd’s lead performance and writing and Jessica Gunning’s supporting performance.
Content note: The series includes stalking, sexual assault, trauma, substance use, and disturbing discussions of abuse. It is a recommendation for viewers prepared for those subjects, not a light thriller to start casually.
Best for: Viewers who value psychologically complicated limited series and can tolerate a show that refuses to make its characters or its own storytelling entirely comfortable.
3. Slow Horses season 4
Why it stands out: The fourth season of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses is a model of sustained quality. It delivers espionage plotting without confusing glamour for intelligence. The series is interested in tradecraft and national-security danger, but its real subject is the damaged, funny, frequently underestimated group of intelligence workers exiled to Slough House.
Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb remains the show’s abrasive center: apparently disorganized, offensively rude, and far more perceptive than he wants anyone to know. Around him, the Slough House team gives the season its lived-in ensemble feeling. Personal history is not decorative backstory; it determines who trusts whom, who panics, and who can recognize danger before the official institutions do.
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The season’s balance is its greatest strength. Sardonic jokes do not cancel the danger, and the danger does not erase the characters’ absurdity. That tonal control is difficult to maintain across a spy plot, especially when the show also wants to make room for grief. TV Insider called it the year’s strongest espionage drama and singled out Jonathan Pryce’s heartbreaking performance.
Rotten Tomatoes’ 2024 guide listed season 4 with a 100% Tomatometer score at the time of that guide’s publication. Scores can change as reviews and site calculations change, but the more durable recommendation is that the season rewards viewers who care about character and consequence as much as action.
Important viewing note: This is a fourth-season recommendation. New viewers can follow the broad premise, but the emotional history of the Slough House team is much richer if you begin with season 1.
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4. Hacks season 3
Why it belongs in the top five: Hacks is both a very funny entertainment-industry comedy and an increasingly thoughtful story about professional reinvention. Season 3 expands the relationship between veteran comedian Deborah Vance and writer Ava while pursuing Deborah’s ambition to break into late-night television.
The show’s generational buddy-comedy setup gives its satire a human engine. Deborah’s ambition is not presented as admirable simply because it is ambitious, and Ava’s youth does not automatically make her morally or creatively superior. Their arguments involve money and career leverage, but they also involve authorship, mentorship, resentment, fear of obsolescence, and the uneasy question of what one person owes another after helping build a career.
TV Insider described the season as a successful generational buddy comedy and emphasized Deborah’s late-night pursuit. The Television Academy’s 2024 Emmy results add substantial institutional support: Hacks won Outstanding Comedy Series, with further recognition for Jean Smart and the writing team.
What makes the season more than an industry satire is its understanding of performance as labor. Deborah is always making a room respond to her, while Ava is learning when observation becomes its own form of power. The jokes land because the professional stakes are real.
Viewing note: Earlier seasons establish the emotional and professional history between Deborah and Ava, so season 3 works best as a continuation rather than a starting point.
Best for: Viewers looking for a sharp comedy with strong performances, show-business satire, and an unusually durable central relationship.
5. Pachinko season 2
Why it ranks fifth: Season 2 continues one of television’s most emotionally expansive family sagas without losing sight of individual choices. The series moves across generations, languages, and historical periods, connecting intimate family decisions to migration, colonialism, war, and inherited memory.
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Its three-generation structure can sound overwhelming on paper, but the show’s power comes from the way large forces arrive in ordinary life. A decision about work, marriage, safety, or belonging carries the pressure of history without reducing the characters to symbols. Korean diasporic experience is not used as background decoration; it shapes the story’s emotional and political architecture.
Rank #3
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TV Guide highlighted the series’ multilingual dialogue, three-generation design, Korean diasporic perspective, and Minha Kim’s performance as Sunja. Rotten Tomatoes’ 2024 guide listed season 2 at 97% on the Tomatometer and praised it as an expansion of the Baek family story that maintained its focus.
This is a season-specific recommendation, not an instruction to begin with season 2. The story’s emotional accumulation depends on what came before, and new viewers should start with season 1. That investment is worthwhile for viewers who like expansive historical dramas that remain anchored in family feeling rather than plot mechanics.
Optional companion reading: The television adaptation is based on Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. The novel is not required to understand the series, but it offers another route into the Baek family’s story and its historical scope. As with any book recommendation, check the edition and local availability before buying.
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6. Say Nothing
Why it makes the list: This FX limited series adapts Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction account of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. It uses a murder, competing memories, prison experiences, political commitment, and the passage of decades to examine violence and grief.
The series is structurally ambitious. At different points it resembles a mystery, spy thriller, prison drama, political history, and elegy. That shifting form reflects the difficulty of reconstructing a conflict in which personal testimony, political loyalty, fear, and public narratives do not neatly align.
TV Guide praised the series’ movement among those modes, while Metacritic placed it among the year’s better-reviewed titles. Its strongest achievement is not simply suspense over who did what. It asks what happens to people who survive political violence, what secrecy does to families, and how a movement’s stated ideals can collide with the damage inflicted in their name.
Historical caution: Say Nothing dramatizes and interprets contested real events. A television adaptation necessarily compresses timelines, combines dramatic approaches, and presents perspectives through a constructed narrative. Do not treat every allegation, recollection, or character viewpoint as settled historical fact. Viewers who want a documented account can consult Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, the nonfiction book on which the series is based, while keeping the distinction between source reporting and television dramatization clear.
Best for: Viewers interested in serious historical storytelling, political violence, contested memory, and limited series that value ambiguity over easy resolution.
7. Industry season 3
Why it belongs here: Season 3 is the point at which HBO’s drama about young professionals in London’s financial sector becomes fully confident about its subject. This is not simply a show about finance or workplace competition. It is about how money reorganizes identity, desire, class, loyalty, and even a person’s understanding of reality.
The season gives its characters more consequential choices and sharper consequences. Its professional vocabulary can be dense, but the emotional logic is clear: people want security, recognition, freedom, revenge, or belonging, and the financial system offers distorted versions of all of them. The show’s appetite for risk extends to its structure, which is willing to make major moves rather than preserve a comfortable status quo.
TV Guide described season 3 as the series’ best, citing its consequential decisions, stronger characterization, and structural boldness. That judgment explains its placement above several more universally accessible shows. Industry is less interested in giving viewers a stable workplace ensemble than in showing how institutions pressure people into becoming versions of themselves they may not recognize.
Viewing note: Season 3 assumes familiarity with the first two seasons. Start at the beginning if you want the relationships, betrayals, and career trajectories to carry their full weight.
Best for: Viewers who want an intense workplace drama about class, addiction, ambition, money, and power—not a straightforward finance procedural.
Rank #4
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8. Fantasmas
Why it is one of the year’s most original shows: Julio Torres’ HBO comedy is deliberately eccentric. Its loose narrative frame involves Torres searching for a lost earring, but that search mainly creates space for surreal sketches and observations about identity, money, bodies, art, anxiety, and the strange rules of social life.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteFantasmas is not plot-driven in the conventional sense. Viewers looking for a steadily escalating story may find it elusive, while viewers who enjoy visual invention and comic detours will find it unusually rewarding. Its episodes behave more like curated dream logic than like traditional sitcom machinery, with jokes that can be tender, absurd, bodily, conceptual, or all four at once.
TV Guide included it among the year’s notable shows, and Metacritic’s 2024 table gave it an 84 Metascore in the researched listing. That number is useful evidence of critical reception, but it does not capture the show’s singularity. The better description is that Fantasmas feels unlike most other television comedy in its visual language and willingness to let an idea remain strange.
Best for: Viewers who prefer surreal, visually inventive, episodic comedy to conventional jokes, plot, and familiar character arcs.
9. The Bear season 3
Why it remains on the list: The third season of The Bear is the most debatable inclusion here, and that is worth stating plainly. Its craft, acting, sound design, editing, and individual episodes remain exceptional, but its more fragmented structure produced a more divided response than the earlier seasons.
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The show continues to treat cooking and restaurant work as physical, emotional, and artistic labor. Its pressure-cooker energy is not limited to kitchen crises; it comes from grief, perfectionism, family inheritance, and the fear that improvement can require abandoning the people who made survival possible. Even when the season drifts away from its most immediately satisfying rhythms, its formal confidence is evident.
The Television Academy records 11 Emmy wins for the series in the 2024 cycle, including acting and directing awards. TV Insider treated it as an honorable mention rather than placing it in its top ten, which reflects the season’s mixed consensus. Its position here rests on technical accomplishment, performances, cultural impact, and the strength of several individual episodes—not on pretending that every viewer agreed it was the show’s best season.
Best for: Viewers who value ambitious ensemble television and are willing to accept a looser, more reflective season in exchange for individual episodes of extraordinary craft.
10. X-Men ’97
Why it closes the top ten: This animated revival succeeds as both a continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series and a surprisingly emotionally forceful superhero drama. It uses the older show’s characters and visual identity without treating nostalgia as its only purpose.
The series is serialized melodrama in the best sense. Its ensemble writing gives multiple characters meaningful emotional and political stakes, while its mutant allegory remains direct without eliminating complexity. The show is willing to let consequences accumulate instead of resetting every episode, which gives its action genuine dramatic cost.
Metacritic’s 2024 all-series table ranked X-Men ’97 fourth with an 84 Metascore in the researched listing. Prior familiarity with the original animated series adds context, but it is not mandatory. New viewers can understand the central conflicts, while longtime fans will recognize the ways the revival builds on its inheritance rather than merely reproducing it.
Best for: Viewers who want animation with political allegory, serialized storytelling, ensemble drama, and consequences that are emotionally serious even when the premise is fantastical.
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Strong near misses and alternate picks
A ranked top ten inevitably leaves out excellent television. The following shows were the most defensible alternatives, and several may be the better choice for a particular viewer.
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- Somebody Somewhere season 3: A warm, humane comedy that TV Guide and TV Insider both treated as a major year-end selection. It is the strongest alternative for viewers who want emotional generosity and low-key humor rather than spectacle.
- English Teacher: A sharp school comedy with social observation and strong ensemble energy. TV Guide’s inclusion makes it an especially credible alternate pick.
- Evil season 4: A witty, unsettling supernatural procedural that brings horror into the conversation. Its combination of theological questions, character chemistry, and genre play helped make it one of the year’s notable returning shows.
- Ripley: A meticulously controlled limited series and one of the strongest choices for viewers who prioritize monochrome visual design, psychological tension, and deliberate pacing.
- The Sympathizer:: A formally ambitious adaptation with political satire and an unstable perspective. It appears among Metacritic’s high-scoring group and is a worthwhile alternative for viewers drawn to identity and historical contradiction.
- The Penguin:: A crime drama built from superhero mythology, recognized by TV Insider as an honorable mention. It is a natural alternate for viewers who want a darker, more conventional serialized genre thriller.
- Fallout:: A successful game adaptation with strong world-building and broad accessibility. It is a sensible choice for viewers who want post-apocalyptic adventure over the slower historical and workplace dramas in the main ranking.
- Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office:: A compelling institutional drama about a real public scandal, especially suited to viewers interested in accountability and the human cost of bureaucratic failure.
- Arcane season 2: One of Rotten Tomatoes’ top-listed 2024 series and an ambitious animated continuation. Its omission is a matter of ranking space, not a judgment that it lacks artistic or emotional achievement.
These alternatives also show why a single list should not be mistaken for a universal verdict. Someone seeking comedy may reasonably put Somebody Somewhere or English Teacher above a historical epic; a horror fan may choose Evil; and an animation fan may prefer Arcane season 2 to several live-action entries.
Where to watch these shows
Streaming availability changes by country, licensing window, subscription tier, and sometimes even by season. The editorial sources associated with this list identify services and destinations including Hulu, Max, Apple TV+, Netflix, FX, and Paramount+, but those references should not be treated as a permanent availability chart. Check the current listing in your country immediately before subscribing or buying an episode.
The safest way to use this list is to search for the exact title and season, then confirm that the listing is official and includes the episodes you need. This matters particularly for season-specific recommendations such as Slow Horses season 4, Hacks season 3, Pachinko season 2, Industry season 3, and The Bear season 3. A service may carry a series while offering a different season arrangement in a particular territory.
Netflix’s official page confirms Baby Reindeer as a 2024 limited series, but even official catalog pages can be region-specific. The same principle applies to every other title here: verify location, season, and current terms rather than relying on an old where-to-watch article.
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Shōgun is the best overall TV show of 2024 because its scale is matched by perspective, control, and exceptional acting. Baby Reindeer is the boldest limited-series experience, Slow Horses the best character-driven spy drama, and Hacks the strongest comedy in the ranking. For historical and international storytelling, choose Pachinko or Say Nothing; for riskier comic television, choose Fantasmas; and for animation with real dramatic consequence, choose X-Men ’97.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best TV show of 2024?
Shōgun is the strongest all-around choice. It combines historical scale, political suspense, multilingual storytelling, cultural perspective, and outstanding performances. If you want a shorter commitment, Baby Reindeer is a seven-episode limited series; if you want comedy, start with Hacks season 3.
Do I need to watch earlier seasons first?
Some entries are complete limited series, including Baby Reindeer and Say Nothing. Others are season-specific recommendations. Start earlier with Slow Horses, Hacks, Pachinko, Industry, and The Bear if you want the characters’ histories and relationships to have their full impact. Prior knowledge of X-Men: The Animated Series helps with X-Men ’97, but it is not essential.
Are all of these shows available on the same streaming service?
Not necessarily. Streaming rights vary by country and change over time. Search for the exact show and season in your local services, and confirm the current catalog, subscription requirements, and episode availability before signing up.
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Several entries deal with difficult material. Baby Reindeer includes stalking, sexual assault, trauma, and substance use. Say Nothing concerns political violence and grief, while Shōgun, Pachinko, and The Bear also contain violence, war, loss, or intense distress. Check a detailed content guide if you need to avoid particular subjects.
The Bottom Line
Bottom line: Start with Shōgun if you want one recommendation that best represents the year. Then choose by mood: Baby Reindeer for psychological intensity, Slow Horses for espionage, Hacks for comedy, Pachinko for family history, and X-Men ’97 for emotionally serious animation.
Quick Recap
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