Best episodes lists often tend to be dominated, these days, by the flashy, format-breaking standalone installments that most great prestige programs seem to unveil once or twice per season.
Our list does, indeed, include a couple of those. We’ve got flashbacks, tonal detours and feature-length episodes that reframe everything we thought we understood about the season or the shows themselves. But we also have some a couple of premieres, a finale or two and just some darned good regular episodes representing the best that the shows have to offer, rather than trying out something new or different. We’ve got animation, documentary and foreign television, plus some comedies, some dramas and whatever The Bear is.
Please note that no matter what the headline here says, this isn’t precisely a “best episodes” list at all. If a show made either of our respective Top 10 lists, we deemed it ineligible for this listing (or our “best” performance list). There’s just too much great TV for us to double-down by including, say, the series finales of My Brilliant Friend or Evil or the Thanksgiving episode of Somebody Somewhere or whichever flight of absurdist fancy from Fantasmas amused us most.
These are, then, SOME of our FAVORITE television episodes of 2024.
“Napkins,” The Bear (FX/Hulu)
However divisive The Bear’s third season may have been overall, its highs were still as warm and sweet as they’ve ever been. Look no further than the Ayo Edebiri-directed “Napkins,” which furnishes Tina an origin story and Liza Colón-Zayas the long-overdue chance to make a full meal out of what has always been a phenomenal supporting performance. Tina’s life-changing first encounter with The Beef, during a particularly demoralizing day, underscores the series’ central themes of care and hospitality while fleshing out our understanding of characters like Jon Bernthal’s Mikey from a new perspective. This might be a relatively modest episode in narrative terms, in that no one gets stabbed or gives birth or discovers a secret fortune stashed in a wall of tomato cans. But don’t be surprised if, by the end, you find yourself crying almost as hard as Tina does the first time she bites into that sandwich. — ANGIE HAN
“Episode 1,” Chicken Nugget (Netflix)
The thing that makes Lee Byeong-heon’s bizarre Netflix comic mystery so special isn’t simply that it’s probably the best show you’ve ever seen about a woman who gets transformed into a chicken nugget, forcing the man who loves her and her father to attempt to figure out how to return her to human form before somebody accidentally eats her for lunch. No, what makes Chicken Nugget so special is that, like the delectable treat in its title, the series proves to be unexpectedly sweet, complexly textured and far more fulfilling that it needs to be. The premiere, written and directed by Lee, quickly introduces the endearingly goofy Baek-joong (Ahn Jae-Hong), the deliciously unobtainable Min-ah (Kim Yoo-jung) and her father Seon-man (Ryu Seung-ryong), and grounds the entire outlandish situation in recognizable emotions before getting to the whole “girl enters machine, chicken nugget exits machine” thing that, honestly, probably could have been enticing enough on its own without actually being good. — DANIEL FIENBERG
“Central,” Expats (Amazon)
Every so often in Amazon’s Expats, the camera passes a doorway with two mops crossed over it just so. It’s a minor background detail that nonetheless speaks to the intent and interiority of an unseen someone — and in the jaw-dropping fifth episode, “Central,” we finally get our glimpse into the Hong Kong that our privileged American protagonists have missed. For a luxurious 97 minutes, creator and director Lulu Wang shifts her focus to the people and communities that our leads have mostly treated as supporting players: the youth protestors agitating for a better Hong Kong, the wealthy Chinese enclave across town and especially the bustling population of Filipina domestic workers (specifically Essie and Puri, played with devastating subtlety by Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Pardenilla). In doing so, the series not only offers a more nuanced holistic view of the city but broadens, complicates and ultimately deepens its insistence on empathy in an uncertain and unjust world. — A.H.
“Bisquik,” Fargo (FX)
By the standards of Fargo, which has included alien visitors and a glimpse of an afterlife set in a bowling alley, maybe having its fifth season conclude with a sin-eater consuming his first homemade biscuit wasn’t all that bizarre — though thanks to the performances by the great Juno Temple and Sam Spruell, it did turn out to be bizarrely heartwarming. The audacity of the finale comes from writer Noah Hawley and director Thomas Bezucha’s willingness to just let the last scene play out with consummate patience over nearly 20 minutes of building suspense, humor and philosophical intrigue. It’s a protracted yet effective open-ended capper for an episode otherwise dominated by death, imprisonment and resolution. The finale, penultimate and antepenultimate episodes of this season were so good I almost convinced myself to place the season in my overall Top 10, even though most of it aired in 2023. — D.F.
“Hometown Prison,” God Bless Texas (HBO)
I will forever be perplexed at how completely HBO blundered the rollout of God Bless Texas, an insightful and empathetic three-episode glimpse at the real Texas beyond red-blue divisions and sensationalistic headlines. Alex Stapleton and Iliana Sosa’s installments, focusing on the erasure of Black lives from Texas’ overall narrative and border life in El Paso, are very good, but the standout is Richard Linklater’s feature-length examination of the death penalty and its connection to his upbringing and his overall body of work. “Hometown Prison” is a passionate piece of documentary advocacy and an introspective piece of autobiography, and I’ll always wonder if HBO might have been smarter to release it separately in theaters after its Sundance premiere. It’s one of the best things Linklater has ever made. — D.F.
“White Mischief,” Industry (HBO)
With its third season, HBO’s finance-biz drama reached both exhilarating new heights of vicious comedy and shocking new depths of depravity and despair. In truth, there were several episodes that probably could have made this list. But I think it’s the yuletide detour “White Mischief” that best demonstrates its growing confidence. The series’ usual fixations on money, identity and class are filtered through the less usual lens of supporting character Rishi (Sagar Radia), a gambling-addicted trader so ostentatiously odious he could give Roman Roy a run for his money — and ultimately renders him, if not really likable or relatable, at least pitiably human. And it does all this within the confines of a breathless Uncut Gems riff that left me torn the entire time between knowing this guy deserves every horrible thing coming for him and kind of rooting for him anyway. — A.H.
Boasting a wonderful guest appearance from Wagner Moura and Parker Posey as a different and more experienced Mr. and Mrs. Smith, “Double Date” is a perfect encapsulation of how Mr. & Mrs. Smith creators Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover were able to turn the premise of Doug Liman’s 2005 film on its head. The episode hints at all of the espionage adventures that the title seemed to promise, but before a mission-of-the-week that plays out largely off-screen, it’s primarily built around a dinner party in which high stakes take a backseat to banter, tall tales and the unpacking of relationship insecurities. Like every episode in the series, what it’s actually about — holding onto what makes your relationship special when faced by a couple that seems smarter, sexier, more in love and just generally BETTER — is wholly relatable, even once the mind-games and and action become outsized. — D.F.
“Do No Harm,” Say Nothing (FX/Hulu)
The wide-ranging ambitions of FX’s searing Irish Troubles drama were reflected in its frequently scattershot storytelling, as it jumped between decades and characters. But for my money, its best outing also was its most focused. “Do No Harm” devotes nearly its entire running time to the ordeal faced by Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and Marian (Hazel Doupe) in a British men’s prison, where they undertake a 208-day hunger strike to demand an Irish women’s one. The narrower scope and slowed-down pacing yield an intimacy that underscores the unbreakable bond between the sisters and their unshakable commitment to the cause — but also the brutality of their treatment, the sometimes complex morality of those involved in it and, perhaps most of all, the stark contrast between the reality of the Prices’ situation and the heroic martyr fantasies they were raised on. — A.H.
“Bart’s Birthday,” The Simpsons (Fox)
Fox’s endlessly resilient animated classic kicked off its 36th season, naturally enough, by staging a series finale — one that used Bart’s upcoming 11th birthday as a jumping-off point to explore finale conventions and clichés, to deal with the show’s challenges integrating serialized plotlines and to muse on fate, free will and the connective tissue binding nearly 770 weekly adventures. The episode is packed with celebrity cameos (led by former Simpsons scribe Conan O’Brien) and laughs, and it’s even a bit provocative. “Bart’s Birthday” offers unexpected proof that The Simpsons still has creative juice at an age at which most hits would be in their third or fourth different unsatisfying reboot — the season has, in general, been impressively creatively dextrous — but it comes with the disquieting realization that whenever this show finally does decide to wrap things up, there’s no chance anybody will be able to conceive of a better ending. — D.F.
Along similar lines, how do you finish a show that never really had a serialized arc to begin with and whose characters are supernaturally resistant to narrative concepts like “emotion” and “change”? If you’re FX’s beloved vampire comedy, with a finale that cheekily acknowledges all those things while also leaving just enough room for us to cry a bit as we say goodbye. The last half-hour was prime What We Do in the Shadows, balancing nostalgic callbacks with fresh wackiness (those alternate “hypnosis” sequences!) and cutting earnest sentimentality with droll irreverence. “This is not the end of anything,” Nadia (Natasia Demetriou) scoffs early on to a distraught Guillermo (Harvey Guillén). “We will keep doing what we always do. It’s just these camera, microphone people will no longer be filming it.” It’s a testament to the richness of this fictional universe that her words feel not only true but oddly reassuring. — A.H.
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