YEAR-END SUMMARY OF MY 2024 POP-CULTURE CONSUMPTION

A few weeks ago I posted my annual Mimsie Awards essay, in which I recap the highlights of my reading year and hand out (completely imaginary) awards to my favorite authors. In this far less ambitious year-end wrap-up I am going to list the best (and worst) of the TV shows and films my wife and I watched in 2024. When you see the sheer number of TV series we watched in 2024 you may get the idea that we spend an ungodly amount of time in front of the TV set. Sadly, that is not entirely untrue. But we often drift away from a TV series after only a couple of episodes. And even when we enjoy a series, we rarely binge our way through every season of it in a single year. In 2024, for instance, we began watching the British crime drama Silent Witness, which we greatly enjoyed. But the series has been on the air for 27 years and comprises 248 episodes to date. Julie and I watched about fifteen of them in 2024. We will continue to watch it in 2025, but I doubt we’ll ever see even a quarter of the entire run. We began by watching the episodes produced around 2015 and then moved forward from there. We do that with a lot of long-running programs – begin in media res and move forward. I won’t list every single series we watched in 2024, but I’ll give you some brief details about our favorites among the programs we watched.

Fargo Season Five: This season starred Juno Temple and Jon Hamm and was, in my opinion, the best yet for this extremely entertaining and intelligent series. You don’t need to have seen any previous seasons of Fargo in order to enjoy and understand this one.

Murder at the End of the World. Made by Brit Marling and her partner Zal Batmanglij, the creators of The O.A., this was an Agatha Christie-like murder mystery set in a billionaire’s secret underground fortress located in some remote and extremely cold part of Iceland (all of Iceland strikes me as cold and remote, but I’m an ignorant Californian and have never been there). I won’t recap the plot, but I found it extremely compelling, even though it had a lot to do with the workings of Silicon Valley tech companies, a subject I know nothing about. I was especially mesmerized by the lead performance of Emma Corrin, but Brit Marling, Clive Owen, and Harris Dickinson were also great. As with The O.A., the plot became a bit too diffuse and over-complicated as the series wore on, and I found the conclusion less than fully satisfying, but I nonetheless enjoyed the series a great deal.

True Detective: The Night Country. This bore a curious resemblance to Murder at the End of the World. Though set in a cold and remote part of Alaska, it was actually filmed in Iceland. It starred Jodie Foster, who, in her twenties, looked a lot like Emma Corrin does today. In fact, Corrin’s Darby Hart character in Murder at the End of the World bore a lot of similarities to Foster’s Clarice Starling character in The Silence of the Lambs. And what I said about Murder at the End of the World goes double for The Night Country: the plot became a bit too diffuse and over-complicated as the series wore on, and I found the conclusion less than fully satisfying, but I nonetheless enjoyed the series a great deal.

Apples Never Fall. Based on a novel by Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, etc.), this Peacock miniseries didn’t get anywhere near as much love from critics as David E. Kelley’s TV adaptation of Big Little Lies received. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it more. It was an unusual TV crime drama in that it wasn’t built around a murder mystery but something much less melodramatic, the disappearance of a wife and mother who may simply have gotten fed up with her dysfunctional family and sought a bit of me time in the country. The series starred Annette Bening and Sam Neil. My favorite performance came from Alison Brie, who played their daughter Amy, a wannabe free-spirited hippie who is actually rather neurotic and sad. This series has only a 46-percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I loved it.

Grace. When we signed up for BritBox this year, Julie and I began binging this crime series, which is set in Brighton-and-Hove and stars John Simm as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. Based on a series of novels by Peter James, Grace follows a format similar to many another British crime drama – Shetland, Ridley, Vera, etc. – but, like those programs, stands out because of its superior writing, acting, and use of a location that hasn’t yet been done to death on British television. I sought out one of the Peter James novels, Want You Dead, and read it. It was enjoyable but I prefer the TV series.

The Jetty. The last drama we binged in 2024 and one of the best. Again, a British crime show about a police detective who does the usual police detective stuff – interviews suspects, follows leads, alienates her bosses – but this one has an especially clever plot which I will say nothing about here. It stars Jenna Coleman, whom I know only from the 2023 Amazon Prime series Wilderness, which I loathed so much that I almost opted not to try The Jetty just because I didn’t want to be reminded of it. As it turns out, Coleman is a gifted actress (although she struck me as too young to be playing DC Ember Manning, a burnt-out cop, a widow, and a mother of a snarky teenage daughter; when I first saw 38-year-old Coleman in a scene with 24-year-old actress Ruby Sparks, I assumed they were playing sisters, but they play a mother and her daughter) and I will be looking out for more of her work in the future.

Condor. This MGM series was based on the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, which was based on the 1974 James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor. Condor starred Max Irons (son of Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack) as CIA analyst Joe Turner, a young man who finds himself caught up in a complex murder plot. Irons performance was so leaden, so one-note, and so unengaging, that we almost gave up on the series after a single episode. Fortunately, we persevered and ended up bingeing both seasons of this underrated spy drama. We never warmed up to Irons, but his weaknesses were compensated for by excellent performances from William Hurt (one of his last), Bob Balaban, Kristen Hager, Toby Leonard Moore, Sam McCarthy (son of Andrew McCarthy), Brendan Fraser, Mira Sorvino, and many others. The standout performance of the series came from 28-year-old actress Leem Lubany, whose turn as sociopath Gabrielle Joubert was nearly as memorable as Anthony Hopkins’s work as Hannibal Lecter. The series was cancelled after two seasons and twenty episodes. Like HBO’s reboot of Perry Mason, which was cancelled after two seasons and sixteen episodes, Condor left us too soon.

The Diplomat Season Two. I loved season one of this Netflix series and figured it would be hard for the producers to recapture that greatness in a follow-up season. But Season Two proved to be every bit as good as Season One, and it ended with an equally compelling cliffhanger. Can’t wait for Season Three.

The Man on the Inside. This series probably won’t resonate with younger viewers as much as it did with Julie and me, both of whom are gray-haired baby boomers like the lead character in this dramedy about a widower (Ted Danson) who takes a job as a private detective and goes undercover in a retirement community in order to try to catch a jewel thief. This was a surprisingly moving story that had a lot of smart things to say about aging, marriage, parenthood, and friendship. I hope Season Two arrives soon.

Ripley. Shot in a gorgeous black-and-white reminiscent of The Bicycle Thief and La Dolce Vita, this latest incarnation of Patricia Highsmith’s iconic The Talented Mr. Ripley, is in many ways the opposite of Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film version. Minghella’s film was full of color and lively music and dashing young people. Steve Zaillian’s Netflix TV series was slow and dark and stately and moody. I loved the 1999 film, but I think this is the best adaptation of a Highsmith novel yet.

Dark Winds. I read a few of Tony Hillerman’s Chee and Leaphorn series of crime novels years ago but never enjoyed them much. As a result, I almost passed on this TV series adapted from them. I’m glad I didn’t. We binged both seasons of this series on Netflix over the course of a week or so (a third season will arrive on AMC in 2025). Set in the Four Corners region of the American southwest sometime around the late 1960s and early 1970s, this series did a great job of capturing both a time and a place. Most of the characters are Navajo, and the series seemed especially interested in delving into their heritage and traditions without becoming a tedious screed about racism in America or the horrors of colonialism (the series depicts plenty of racism without becoming preachy about it). Even if the storylines had been conventional, the series would have been worth watching for the performances. Zahn McClarnon was the clear standout here, but Jessica Matten, Rainn Wilson, and Noah Emmerich were also especially memorable. Fortunately, the storylines were not conventional. They twisted and turned in surprising ways.

The Day of the Jackal. Being a hardcore Frederick Forsyth fan, there was no way I was going to miss this series. Like Condor, it bears only a slight resemblance to the 1970s thriller on which it was based. Forsyth’s novel is about an attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle back in 1963. The recent Peacock miniseries is about an attempt to assassinate a tech billionaire in 2024. The technology is different, the characters are different, the settings are different, and the plot is different. Nonetheless, the miniseries seemed to truly respect and appreciate what made Forsyth’s novel such a monumental achievement. This is made evident by the amount of attention the show’s creators paid to the details of the Jackal’s profession: the guns he uses, the disguises he employs, the use of false passports and other identifying documents, his attention to things like wind speed and wind direction while setting up a kill shot, the lengths he goes to in order to cover up his tracks, and so forth. For me, this really felt like a Frederick Forsyth thriller.

Also worthy of mention were the programs Sugar (starring Colin Farrell), Vigil (Suranne Jones and Rose Leslie), Maryland (Suranne Jones and Eve Best), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Donald Glover and Maya Erskine), Resident Alien (Alan Tudyk), Palm Royale (Kristen Wiig and Alison Janney, with memorable support from Carol Burnett), The Gentlemen (Theo James and Kaya Scodelario), Bodkin (Will Forte and Siobhan Cullen), Bay (Morven Christie), Payback (Morven Christie and Peter Mullan), Presumed Innocent (Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Ruth Negga, Bill Camp, O-T Fagbenle), Maxton Hall (Harriet Herbig-Matten and Damian Hardung), Bad Monkey (Vince Vaughn starred and was excellent but Meredith Hagner and Jodie Turner-Smith gave the standout performances), Trauma (John Simms and Adrian Lester), Inside Man (Stanley Tucci and David Tennant), Rivals (Alex Hassell and David Tennant starred but got a lot of good support from a large cast of great performers), The Day of the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch), Black Doves (Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw, and Sarah Lancashire), and Silent Witness (Emilia Fox and David Caves, with memorable support from Liz Carr).

So much for the good. As for the bad and the ugly, well, the Netflix program Eric (Benedict Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann) was far and away the worst series that we actually watched all of in 2024 (we kept hoping it would get better). Also awful was Death and Other Details (despite engaging performances by Violett Beane and Mandy Patinkin). I published an entire essay about the awfulness of The Perfect Couple (Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber), so poke around in my Substack table of contents if you want to know more about it. I loved Blake Crouch’s novel Dark Matter but he should never have been allowed to adapt it for Apple-TV. The job should have been given to someone less attached to the book. What works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen. A Man in Full (Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane) was watchable and, if you aren’t familiar with the Tom Wolfe novel on which it was based, probably entertaining. But David E. Kelley jettisoned most of the social satire that made the book so memorable and relevant. Those were the lowlights of what was, all in all, a pretty good year for TV in the Mims household.

I find it more difficult to rank the best movies we watched in any given year. In 2024, we watched some bona fide classics, often because I planned on writing about them. Among these were such gems as The Third Man, The Manchurian Candidate, Bonnie & Clyde, and Elevator to the Gallows. We also watched some recent box-office attractions such as Twister, The Fall Guy, Anyone But You, Conclave, and The Holdovers. I was disappointed by The Holdovers and Conclave (the Robert Harris novel is better than the film), but the others were all entertaining. I have a fondness for small- and mid-budget action and/or suspense films. In 2024, I saw some good ones including Afraid (Katherine Waterston, John Cho, and Lukita Maxwell), Apartment 7A (Julia Garner), Woman of the Hour (Anna Kendrick, who also directed), Don’t Move (Kelsey Asbille), Roadhouse (Jake Gyllenhaal), Hit Man (Glenn Powell) and You Should Have Left (Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried – scramble their names and you get the anagram, “Yes, Kevin, a man fried da bacon.”). I enjoy watching old classics and I enjoy watching new, low-budget thrillers, but I’m not sure how to rank them against each other. I found myself gripped by Don’t Move and Woman of the Hour in a way that I wasn’t by, say, Bonnie & Clyde, simply because I already knew the outcome of Bonnie & Clyde. Re-watching a classic is a completely different experience than watching something you’ve never seen before. In 2024 I was really looking forward to seeing the film Love Lies Bleeding, because it is a low-budget noir thriller and it stars my favorite living actress, Kristen Stewart. Alas, though Stewart was brilliant as usual, the film wasn’t quite as gripping nor as edgy as it seemed to think it was. Role Play, starring Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo, was probably the worst film I watched all the way to the end of in 2024. It came to life only in the fifteen or so minutes that Bill Nighy appeared on screen. After that it was intolerably stupid and dull.

Normally, I end my Mimsie Awards essay with a list of every book I read in the previous year. I didn’t do so this year because I published the list about two weeks before the end of the year. Now that the year is over, I’ll give you a list of every book I read in 2024. Alas, I have a list of titles at hand, but I didn’t write down all of the author’s names and I’m too lazy right now to track them all down, so I shall only list the authors whose names I can remember.

You’ll Like My Mother

Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

Northwater

Night Life by Thomas Perry

The Cobra Event by Richard Preston

Relic by Preston and Childs

Dad by William Wharton (a re-read)

Zen and the Art… by Robert Pirsig

Slough House by Mick Herron

Gwen in Green

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

The People Therein

Shadow of Cain by Bugliosi and Hurwitz

Miss Bishop by Bess Streeter Aldrich

A Lantern in Her Hand (ditto)

A White Bird Flying (ditto)

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

Night Stalks the Mansion

To Die in California by Newton Thornburg

Cold Storage by David Koepp

Aurora (ditto)

The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen (hereafter identified as TG)

Diary of a Yuppie by Louis Auchincloss (I read a lot of yuppie stuff for my Bright Lights, Big City essay)

Beyond this Point are Monsters by Margaret Millar

The Chill by Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar)

Storm by George R. Stewart

Earth Abides (ditto)

Bloodstream by TG

The Intruder by Pat Maldonado

Harvest by TG

Resident Alien

The Silent Patient

V2 by Robert Harris

The Southwest Corner by Mildred Walker

The Fist of God by Frederick Forsyth

Icon (ditto)

The Afghan (ditto)

The Light Pirate

The Life and Truth of George R. Stewart by Donald Scott

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

Fatherland by Robert Harris

The Children of Men by P.D. James

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

The Kill Artist

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynsky

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

Sam Chance by Benjamin Capps

Primary Colors by Joe Klein

Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

Earl Scruggs & Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (hereafter referred to as JW)

The Surprise Party Complex by Ramona Stewart

The Midwich Cuckoos by JW

Big Fiction

The Chrysalids by JW

Chocky by JW

The Kraken Awakes by JW

Consider Her Ways by JW

Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

The Seeds of Time by JW

Web by JW

The Death of Grass by John Christopher

The Trouble With Lichen by JW

Lightning by Dean Koontz

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

The Big Picture by Douglas Kennedy

Triumph of the Yuppies

Carriers by Patrick Lynch

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

A Monster Calls

Ice Cold by TG

The Valley of Unknowing by Philip Sington

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (reread)

The Syndrome by John Case

Psycho by Robert Bloch

The Truth and Other Lies

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray

A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett

Son of Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini

Precipice by Robert Harris

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland

Missing

Wordhunter

Charlie Chan Yunte Huang

The Pandora Man

Grocery by Michael Ruhlman

Charlie Chan’s Words of Wisdom

Gravity by TG

Sonny Boy by Al Pacino

The Shape of Night by TG

Life Support by TG

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Koretz

The Bone Garden by TG

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The Apprentice by TG

Playing With Fire by TG

The Spy Coast by TG

Havana by Stephen Hunter

A Town Called Freedom by Ken Follett

Want You Dead by Peter James

The Keepsake by TG

Under the Knife by TG

Final Cut by Charles Burns

The Sinner by TG

Body Double by TG

The Third Twin by Ken Follett

The Fifth Angel by David Wiltse

The Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore (aka James Kestrel).