2024 Year in Review Part 3: Television

So far, I’ve given the history of my year in review and covered what I read and movies I’ve seen. As for television, 67 television shows/seasons watched and 391 actual episodes is a bit sobering of a statistic, to be honest. As with the movies, I’m not going into each, but here are the highlights.

For things watched because they had someone in it I was a fan of, a special shout out to Michael Sheen for getting me to willingly watch anything that is in regards to the Prince Andrew scandal. His episode of Carpool Karaoke is hilarious as well. Another shout out goes to Alan Tudyk for convincing me to give Resident Alien a try. And since Kate has become a fan of Con O’Neill since Our Flag Means Death, we managed to catch his episode of Midsomer Murders (weaponized cheese for the win!).

I also am very glad I gave The Big Door Prize a try in 2023 thanks to it having Jim Meskiman (who I interviewed during The Longest Day fundraiser) and Chris O’Dowd in it. Season 2 has been just as delightfully odd as season 1 was, and I am eager to see where it’s going. Finally for this section, I also re-watched the episode of Inside the Actors Studio with Stephen Sondheim and thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting to be a writer.

I want to give a big ol’ ‘fuck you’ (complimentary) to Michael Shur, Ted Danson, and Marc Evan Jackson for convincing me to watch the heartbreaking series one of A Man on the Inside. As I wrote on Facebook, “‘Hey,’ I thought, ‘let’s watch this new comedy to distract myself from the world and cheer myself up.’ Am now crying at Ted Danson doing Shakespeare. Which – knowing Schur, I guess I should’ve expected.” Having had a theatre teacher who died because of complications due to Alzheimer’s means this show (which I binged all eight episodes of at once) was a double whammy for me. Leave it to Shur to make a show that is both hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

A friend of mine turned me onto Looking, which has an older Scott Bakula in it sporadically throughout the first season. However, when I saw it had Jonathan Groff and Russell Tovey in it, it shot up to my ‘need to see this’ list. Sort of a modern-day Queer as Folk (and boy do I feel old writing THAT), it was a good exploration of the current (well, current as of 2014) status of gay men and I highly enjoyed it.

Which … speaking of Scott Bakula, back in July a friend of mine (the same friend who recommended Looking) had started re-watching the original Quantum Leap. This was shortly after Jen Rossman had live-tweeted her re-watch of the series (they are hilarious and one of the few remaining reasons I go to Twitter anymore). Their comments combined with me finding a new fanfic author for the series on AO3 got me started watching this show again. I had fallen – and fallen HARD – for QL slashfic in 2000/2001 (a story for another time). So, this all made me give a go at re-watching the series as well. As I watched, I caught myself making comments about what I saw … to the point that I decided to start writing them up for my fandom blog (here’s a link to the first one). I also started back to writing fanfic for it as well.

Since I’m on the topic of hyperfocuses, thanks to it being connected to The Sandman and Neil Gaiman (yeah, yeah – this was before that news hit), I gave Dead Boy Detectives a try, and boy howdy am I glad I did. Not only did I write up a review for it for The Geekiary, it quickly shot onto my hyperfocus list and is now on the list of my favorite television shows ever. Even though it didn’t get renewed (thanks, Neil), I still recommend it to anyone and everyone I can.

Back when I was writing Quantum Leap slash, the X-Files spinoff series The Lone Gunmen premiered. While the show itself was hit or miss, it made me (and a few friends) start writing slash for the trio. (As I wrote in my recommendation for The Geekiary’s article “What We’re Watching in This Post-Election Hellscape”, hush – this trio is fun to write.) So, as I started re-watching Quantum Leap, I also started re-watching just their episodes of The X-Files. Melvin Frohike, I love you.

For my final hyperfocus, of course Doctor Who came back – now on Disney+ so I can watch it legally (which, of course, I have ALWAYS done <g>) for the first season. I reviewed episode 2 and 3 for The Geekiary in 2024 (and just reviewed the Christmas holiday special), but watched the full series. (Life sort of hit me and I just didn’t have the time or energy.) But the highlight actually had to be that I got a chance to watch episode 3, “The Devil’s Chord”, at the official Doctor Who LA premiere! Not only was I within lunging distance of Russell T Davies, Ncuti Gatwa, and Millie Gibson (I could see her checking her Instagram!), when I went up to the registration table to check in, I was told, “Oh, yes: I recognize that name”. SQUEE.

Being a geek, many of the shows I watched were based on comic books (or at least comic book characters). From continuing my watching of The Flash (as I wrote in last year’s media write-up, Grant Gustin is frackin’ adorable as Flash) to X-Men ’97, I am an equal opportunist when it comes to the Marvel vs. DC argument. In fact, I tried Extraordinary because it was superheroes, as well as watched the final season of The Umbrella Academy and the latest season of The Boys even though I’m not familiar with the comics at all. But the highlight (and my recommendation) of the year has to be Agatha All Along. I won’t go into too many details since I did review it for The Geekiary, but suffice to say that it’s up there with Wanda/Vision as to my favorite Marvel property now.

And speaking of geeky shows, I gave Fallout a try and loved it. As part of the promotion, Amazon Prime offered up the game version of Fallout 76. While I started playing, my wife asked to give it a try two weeks later … and I haven’t played since. (In other words, she has a new hyperfocus herself.) Which, speaking of gaming, in February I capitulated and downloaded Stardew Valley and basically played it like it was air.

Finally, a shout out to What We Do in the Shadows, which ended after six seasons on FX (but I watched via Hulu). While I was tepid on the movie version when I tried it, I gave the television show a shot when it premiered and fell head over heels for all the characters, but especially Guillermo de la Cruz, played by the fabulous Harvey Guillén (who has been taking his new-found celebrity and just making it worth every bit – I really hope he continues getting projects in Hollywood). The season finale was (thankfully) a good one, and I’m glad it ended on a laugh.

And while technically not television (it’s YouTube), I started watching Game Changer and Make Some Noise, as I kept seeing clips on Facebook and got hooked.

My overall recommendations from 2024: Agatha All Along, Dead Boy Detectives, A Man on the Inside, and What We Do in the Shadows (with a special shout out to Only Murders in the Building‘s season 4, as I was about to give up on the show and I was so glad I didn’t).