Best TV Episodes of 2024

This listing will not be as definitive as our best-of-the-year listing — no human can watch each episode of TV made in a 12 months — and it contains many less-than-famous titles. But for my cash, it’s at all times probably the most enjoyable listing to place collectively. What you be taught, spending a 12 months watching sequence after sequence that you could be by no means find yourself writing about, is that greatness can pop up anyplace, typically the place you’ll anticipate it, typically in an offbeat documentary or an off-the-radar streaming curio.

A critic ends yearly with a pocketful of those randomly acquired gems, and it’s a pleasure to dump them out on the desk for you right here. Enjoy, and be at liberty to share your personal. JAMES PONIEWOZIK

‘Baby Reindeer’

Episode 4

Created by and starring Richard Gadd, and based mostly on his life, “Baby Reindeer” knocked me out this 12 months with its gnarled and uncompromising depictions of stalking, sexual assault, disgrace and ambition. Episode 4 is among the many extra gripping, disturbing hours of TV I’ve ever seen, as Gadd’s character, Donny, finds himself being groomed, drugged, raped and manipulated by a person he revered, a person who promised to assist his profession. “Reindeer” rejects something resembling tidy morality and as a substitute digs into the complicated mechanisms of victimhood, the assorted distorting lenses of abuse. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONS

‘The Bear’

Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Napkins’

This season of “The Bear” was a meal higher gazed upon than eaten, dazzling on the display screen however lethargic in its story. But “Napkins” took us again, each in narrative time and to the vitality and go-for-broke emotion of the sooner seasons. It follows Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) on a humiliating job hunt and thru the doorways of the title restaurant — then nonetheless an Italian beef sandwich joint — for a very good cry, a restorative meal and finally a job. A tribute to the ability of labor to supply objective and eating places to supply restoration, “Napkins” stepped again from the season’s abstractions and provided a meaty mouthful. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK

‘Blue Lights’

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘The Q Word’

The Northern Irish sequence “Blue Lights” is the most effective new police procedural to return round shortly, and it finds recent methods to undergo the style’s acquainted paces. One younger cop frequently turns down assignments, and we rapidly see that she is each entitled and — far more uncommon for this sort of present — a coward. In this taut episode, she discovered herself within the discipline and was compelled to choose, in a second that was actually shattering. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE