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The Best TV Shows of 2024 (So Far)
Women seeking justice, reality stars forging new alliances, and aliens who do not come in peace.
The cultural references generated by creator Meredith Scardino and her team of writers range from the of-the-moment — there are tons of Netflix gags and a Girls5eva country song built for this Cowboy Carter moment — to the delightfully obscure, including riffs on the comic strip “Andy Capp” and this 2004 incident involving Jessica Simpson and Jewel. This is a coolly confident, precisely constructed series with a number of excellent performances (Ken Watanabe as a beleaguered detective chasing the yakuza; Rinko Kikuchi as an encouraging editor unwilling to cut Ansel Elgort’s reporter, Jake Adelstein, any slack; the scene-stealing Sho Kasamatsu as a gangster on the rise in his organization) and an evocative visual style that makes 1999 Tokyo look worthy of building a time machine to get to. Everyone here is doing fantastic work — Juno Temple’s steely resolve and chameleonic physicality; Jennifer Jason Leigh’s cunning, me-first brand of feminism; Jon Hamm’s growling and nipple-pierced exceptionalism — but the season belongs to Sam Spruell’s Ole Munch, who encapsulates the series’ ideas about debt as a religious, financial, and cultural force of identity obliteration.
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