2024’s top 30 (and 5 worst) global television series: The pickings get slimmer (1)

Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office

It’s been a strange television season. The general trend, continuing from last year,  is trimming and cutting back as the streamers realize that streaming, though here to stay, is not the manna from heaven they thought it was. Meanwhile, led by the U.S., cable television is collapsing, as companies spin off once-profitable networks, a victim of their own greed in raising cable prices.

The year was highlighted by massive cutbacks in production allocations. Netflix, whose series are of dubious quality, was the only streamer to keep up series’ saturation by not shrinking its overall budget. The attack on writers continues with smaller writing rooms, and there is also a general ideological trend toward conformity—Russian, Chinese, Syrian and Iranian bad guys abound—that saps creativity and complexity.

The effects of cost-cutting this year could best be seen in the number of failed second, third and even fourth seasons in several series. Frazier, not an original but a revival, after all, got so lame that in season two the series, after opening with an episode that was much ado about ham—I kid you not—then resorted to redoing Three Men and a Baby. The CBS/Paramount audience is old but it’s not dead.

Three Walking Dead spinoffs collapsed under their own weight. Dead City was nothing but an extended fight between its two leads, a replay of past seasons of the series. The Ones Who Live, supposedly a tender love story between Rick and Michonne, returned to the mother series’ earlier “philosophizing” mode, posing imperial questions such as how much killing does it take to lose your humanity, as the Biden administration dithered on the proper number of Gazans to die. Finally, the most promising of the three, Daryl Dixon, which had a great first season with the redneck-with-a-heart-of-gold Daryl somehow stranded in a France overrun by a Le Pen wannabe, shed much of that energy in the second season centered around the reunion of Daryl and his fighting companion Carol, a meeting only of interest to hardened series regulars. We knew the apocalypse is coming. We just didn’t know it would be this tedious.

The Old Man, with Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow as foes in season one, aged rapidly as the two united in season two in Afghanistan, always the weakest element of the series. Only Murders in the Building resorted to a “meta” season, with the three leads’ podcast now going Hollywood and the characters filming each other. Meta episodes are always a sign the show has run out of steam and in this case an entire meta season was unbearable.

The Chuck Lorre formula (Two and a Half Men, Moms, The Big Bang Theory) which sustained network television comedy for so long also floundered with Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage, a weak attempt to recapture the working-class ambiance of the original Roseanne with characters so sterile as to be inert, exhausting the reach of The Big Bang Theory whose “universe” is based around a single character, Sheldon Cooper.

An interestingly premised procedural such as The Irrational, with a backstory where its African-American lead was burned in a racist attack, abandoned that thread in the second season in favor of simply folding all the characters into deep state law enforcement as even the lead’s hacker sister goes to work for the FBI and is told in one episode that if you must choose between (repressive, state) “law enforcement” and “your friends,” the correct choice is repression and friends be damned.

Finally even Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s class-combative series, about a train that carries the survivors of a nuclear winter, ran off the rails in season four which had the characters, while opposing the new fascist commander of the train, mainly carping among themselves.

Makes one appreciate a solid genre series like MGM’s From, where the terror of a group trapped in their houses at night in a Lost-type world by not being metaphysical resounds all the more with the deteriorating situation on a U.S. homefront where social services and wellbeing are sapped by ever more spending on weapons and global war. The actual terror of this series also gives the lie to ungrounded pretentious gated-community claptrap with no material resonance like The Leftovers.

Nevertheless, in spanning the globe, there were enough series of interest to compile a list of 14 Bests, 14 Honorable Mentions, and two Retro Series to catch up on, plus five worst. Approximately 20 countries are represented in this survey culled from 120 series watched this year with many more skipped because the premise was simply dull or irrelevant, meaning that far less than one-fourth of the series put out to audiences were, in my opinion, worth their time.

Best of global TV

The Gone—What lifts this New Zealand/Irish co-pro, set in New Zealand, above the standard “cop out of water” or “investigator returns home” series is the crossing of the cultures of the Gaelic male cop and his female Māori partner and the constant interplay between the two Indigenous ways of life. They even point to a common foe as the Irish cop, plagued by an afflicted past, shares a spliff with a Māori community leader with both communing about their historical mutual oppressor, the “fucking English” (Discovery +). With a turn to conservatism and a new attack on its Native inhabitants, New Zealand was later in the season represented by a mostly Anglo cast in another series, A Remarkable Place to Die, with in this case the Māori firmly back in their place as serving the white police power structure and with the focus on the Anglo cop and her mother.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office—Not only an exposé of a cold, calculating and ultimately irrational corporate system which the British power structure believed over the words of its local postmasters, trusted members of the community, this series, which brought some measure of justice at least momentarily to workers harassed to the point of suicide, also pointed to the larger mechanical and unfeeling attack on service workers which will only multiply here at home as Elon Musk and the rest of Silicon Valley continue their assault under Trump. Toby Jones (Games of Thrones but more relevant here Don’t Forget the Driver about a besieged but caring bus driver) leads a stellar cast (Amazon Prime).

The Seed—This German/Norwegian series cuts back and forth between the world’s largest seed vault in Norway and the seat of European power in Brussels. In both, a corporate enterprise is trying to corner the market and conceal its malfeasance in nabbing the world’s food supply. Excellent relationship between a hardened German cop and his more in-touch-with-nature Norwegian female partner as they discover the truth about an uncompromising corporate grab for power where one corrupt CEO is replaced by one even more corrupt, all to keep the stockholders happy (Disney Plus).

Troppo Season 2—Fine follow-up to the first season of this Australian series set in the wilds of Queensland and all about the relationship between a bitter cop, falsely accused of pederasty, and the lesbian Indigenous founder of their private detective agency, who herself has served a stint for murder. Season two centers around the shadowy doings at a rehab center as Ted and Amanda battle their own demons in attempting both to prove themselves innocent and to expose a triple murderer (Prime Video).

Ammo—Another Norwegian series, this one about the inner workings and blatant corruption of an arms industry whose CEO, although promoting “weapons for peace,” is not above strangling his own wiser and more cautious relatives as he also participates in the cover-up of a company drone attack gone murderously awry. The series, quoting from the latest headlines, questions the “benevolent” presence of the French in Mali, site of the massacre, as the French military prepares to wreak havoc upon their being thrown out of the country. The lead character, hired by the company as a patsy is, ultimately, not a whistleblowing hero but one more compromised cog in this deadly machine. A convincing negative ending suggests that opposing these companies, which have helped bring the world to the brink of a possible nuclear war, is a long, hard uphill slog, but one essential to engage in (Apple TV).

Matlock—The surprise of this TV season: a network (CBS) series with guts and heart in tackling not only the heartlessness of corporate law but also in tenderly evoking something unusual in television, a complicated senior relationship. Kathy Bates, in what she says is her last go round and will likely win her an Emmy, is a geriatric lawyer come out of retirement to determine which member of the law firm she gets herself hired onto has concealed information about an opioid that led to the death of her daughter. She and her husband call themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” citing the oft-filmed spies, but in actuality succeed not through mechanical devices but through Maddie’s (Bates) hard-won wisdom which enables her to treat clients humanely. Secondary characters, especially Olympia, the African-American partner at the firm who is reforming and handling cases involving non-corporate clients, are also well drawn and add to the effectiveness of a series that might easily have simply been a revival rip-off a nondescript Andy Griffith vehicle from the 1980s (Paramount +).

Blackshore—Tough-minded Irish lesbian cop returns to her home along the sea with, as in the best of this genre, the trail leading ever upward in the town’s hierarchy and power structure in a way that also exposes a hardened masculinity that includes the “kindly” priest. Fia is relentless in pursuing the truth about a missing teenager which, as similarly in the Icelandic series before it. The Valhalla Murders, does not settle for ultimately accusing a victim but continues to climb higher as a criminal net based on local profit expands (Prime Video).

High Country—A mixed-race Australian cop battles to solve a mystery which may involve a forest spirit while at the same time struggling to renew her connection with her Indigenous heritage. Meanwhile her female partner falls under the spell of an artist’s community guru who under the guise of helping their marriage is actually attempting to break it up. The leads’ relationship is complex and nuanced and, finally, tender, as is the budding relationship between the couple’s daughter and an Indigenous teen who acquaints her with the beauty of the natural landscape (Prime Video).

Machine—French series which pairs a female martial arts assassin escaped from the French intelligence service with a fiery male, avowedly Marxist labor organizer in the plant where she is hiding out. The still strong echoes of the French social realist tradition meets the Asian action genre in this thriller concerning a factory about to be taken over and closed by corporate goons (Prime Video).

Disco ’76—The dance floor hums in this German series about how a young woman trying to escape the grasp of a deafeningly stultifying masculinity is introduced to the liberatory freedom of club music by African-American G.I.s. She then opens her own disco in defiance of her rigid father as the euphoria and utopian mixing of classes and races on the dance hall lodged in a secret room behind her father’s staid German pub open up new vistas in a parochial town (RTL+).

Dates IRL—This Norwegian series touchingly and with a good deal of humor confronts the problem of a generation raised in a virtual reality and not, as the title phrase suggests, “In Real Life.” When an online relationship in Silicon Valley, California, ends with her partner “cheating” on her with another online partner, 25-year-old Ida enters a physical dating world. That world, though, is highly influenced by omnipresent digital reality with dates whose sex life seems already ruined by their daily online encounters with porn. A wise, satirical rendering of our current shattered reality describes the negative influence of the global dominance of American tech (Apple TV).

Nemesis—The lead prosecutor’s waffling about her commitment to doggedly pursuing an investigation of a shady firm that secretes funds offshore and goes to any lengths to avoid opening its books goes hand in hand with her waffling about the role of her ex-husband as boss and would-be reuniter of the family, and makes for an annoying rather than a complex character in this Dutch series. Ultimately, though, she makes the right decision about both. Along the way, especially in a sequence which involves her leaving her shoes in the den of a suspect, the series features a number of suspense set pieces that would make Alfred Hitchcock blush (Disney+).

The Big Cigar—The continually surprising aspect of this series, based on a true story about a successful ’70s Hollywood producer who takes it upon himself to defy the FBI by smuggling Black Panther leader Huey Newton, facing the bureau’s trumped-up charges, to Cuba, is that the emphasis is not on the ’70s Hollywood maven but rather remains solidly focused on Huey. Flashbacks reveal his helping to found the Panthers, his surviving assassination and his relationship with both a female supporter his own age and his younger lover. The villain, as the scene shifts to Mexico, is a hippie undercover agent whose obsessional pursuit of Huey is not only his quest to take down a strong Black man but also his desire to put a revolutionary in jail (Apple TV+).

After the Flood—British ITV series that outdid in its faster pace any series on the stodgy “all things to all people and hence nothing to anyone” BBC. Takes on the crucial climate question, a key one for Britain, the U.S. East Coast, and around the world, of a deluge as part of the global environmental catastrophe. The flooded town, named Waterside, must confront insurance policies which no longer will cover flood disasters and a supposed “eco-friendly” developer whose digging up the land for a high-priced housing complex contributes to the devastation. This criminality which ravages the community is seen through the eyes of a dogged older female police officer, new to the force and thus less corrupted (Prime Video).

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CONTRIBUTOR

Dennis Broe

Dennis Broe, a film, television and art critic, is also the author of the Harry Palmer LA Mysteries. His latest novel, The Dark Ages, focuses on McCarthyite repression in Los Angeles in the 1950s.