Lifestyle
In 2024, our TV critic was grateful for fantastic shows and familiar faces
Andrew Scott starred in the Netflix series Ripley, which was the most stunningly shot show TV critic David Bianculli saw in 2024.
Stefano Cristiano Montesi/Netflix
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Stefano Cristiano Montesi/Netflix
I watch more television than anyone I know — and even I can’t pretend to have seen enough to compile a comprehensive end-of-year top 10 list. What I can do is run through a list of the best things I’ve seen, and why I like them so much. And also, to note a trend or two that seem unique to the current year. If you’re looking for great TV to binge over the holidays, consider this a quick guide.
One show that may not make many 2024 top 10 lists, because of its last-second arrival, is the return of Squid Game. Season 1 of this South Korean drama series premiered on Netflix three years ago, and was a surprise but well-deserved hit. Season 2 doesn’t drop until the day after Christmas — but I’ve previewed it, and it’s a worthy successor. It expands the focus, the perspectives, even the number of games, and is as brutal, yet as beautifully photographed and intensely acted, as the original. And speaking of beautifully photographed, let’s give a nod to another Netflix series, Ripley, the most stunningly shot TV series I saw in 2024.
The best nonfiction shows I saw all year? Beatles ’64 on Disney+, and Leonardo Da Vinci on PBS. The best talk shows? HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Netflix’s John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. The best scripted drama and comedy shows? Many were returning series with strong outings in 2024. The latest season of FX’s Fargo, with Juno Temple and Jon Hamm, was stunning, surprising and impossible to forget — my favorite series of the year.
Season 2 of Netflix’s The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, built to a point where it was almost too tense to watch, and ended with a cliffhanger guaranteed to make Season 3 even more of a thrill ride. The latest season of Hulu’s The Bear, about workers in and around a newly launched high-end Chicago restaurant, disappointed some, but not me — I ate it all up, especially the final episode.
On the lighter side, the 2024 season of another Hulu series, Only Murders in the Building, was a comedy triumph, giving Meryl Streep an unexpectedly rich role to play, and play with, on TV. And the latest season of Max’s Hacks gave Jean Smart the same thing. She’s wonderful — and that show’s cliffhanger ending promises another great season to come there, too.
Two series ended in 2024, with noteworthy finales. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, the long-running Larry David comedy, went out with much attention and fanfare. The Paramount+ series Evil went out with very little. Both were very intelligent, entertaining shows that I watched, and looked forward to, every week until they ended. So farewell and thanks to Curb and Evil.
And hello to a lot of new shows that really made strong first impressions. If you like dramas about intrigue involving politicians or spies, 2024 was a banner year. Black Doves, on Netflix, had Keira Knightley as a very clandestine spy, and she and it were really good. The Madness, starring Colman Domingo as a TV pundit accused of murder, and on the run — a sort of updated version of The Fugitive — also is on Netflix, and is even better than Black Doves. And best of all is The Agency, a new spy series on Showtime and Paramount+ that stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere. It’s rolling out weekly at the moment, and is another of the great shows I’ve seen this year.
HBO’s The Penguin surprised me, very pleasantly, with its plot and intensity, and with its impressive leading performances by Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti. Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, a sort of 21st-century Bridget Loves Bernie, was surprising too — funny and tender and romantic in all the right measures. Also deserving of mention, and definitely worth watching: FX’s remake of the miniseries Shōgun; Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson in yet another excellent TV series; and Agatha All Along, the imaginative, very musical Disney+ sequel to WandaVision.
Watch enough of these great shows — as I did — and you’ll notice some recurring patterns. Some of the same actors popped up in very different places. Jamie Lee Curtis returned as the unstable mother on The Bear — but she also played a ruthless hit woman in Prime Video’s The Sticky. Jodie Turner-Smith, whom I singled out for her great acting in Bad Monkey as the Dragon Queen, shows up as the female lead in The Agency — and is amazing again, in a completely different type of role. And Tracey Ullman, who was so funny as Larry David’s unwanted live-in girlfriend on Curb Your Enthusiasm, also showed up at the end of Black Doves, playing a very serious, potentially lethal adversary to Knightley’s undercover spy — and, for Ullman, a drastically, impressively different type of role.
Another trend I noticed was how many shows in 2024 featured actors of a certain age — not just in toss-away or clownish roles, but in meaty parts that these veteran performers elevate even higher. I’ve mentioned some already, from Gere to Streep, but I saw more on TV in 2024 than in any year in decades. These include some of the best performances in some of the year’s best shows: Martin Short and Steve Martin in Only Murders; Helen Hunt and Christopher Lloyd in Hacks; Sally Struthers in A Man on the Inside; and Margo Martindale in The Sticky.
I’m happy to see them all working, and thriving, even in a year when the TV terrain has been tougher to navigate — not only for those working in the medium, but those of us watching it. I’m also happy to have seen so many good and great shows in 2024, even if I know I’ve missed many more.
To sum up, I want to talk about a scene that comes up near the end of my favorite show of the year. It comes near the end of my favorite show of the year, Noah Hawley’s Fargo. A mysterious and lethal killer visits a suburban home, intending to kill the family within, but is greeted instead with disarming kindness. The father hands him a cold bottle of orange soda, then clicks it against his own. The killer replies with a short and simple phrase — but it’s a phrase that captures perfectly my overall attitude towards television in the year 2024.
“A man,’ he says, slowly but appreciatively, “is grateful.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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