Television has been facing headwinds for several years, buffeted by the pandemic, the Hollywood writers’ strike of 2023 and the thumping losses racked up by streamers such as Disney and Paramount, which have ploughed billions into their services with little prospect of breaking even. Amid such turmoil, it’s no surprise that the industry has finally trimmed its sails. The story of 2024 has been that, after the blockbusting arms race of the past half-decade, TV is finally getting smaller. Television is going back to being television again.
The big hits came from leftfield. Shogun (Disney+) broke all the rules as a largely non-English-language adaptation of an unfashionable 50-year-old novel about Byzantine politics in 17th-century feudal Japan. Yet it proved a ratings smash and an enormous critical success, earning a record 18 Emmy nominations.
Also dropping out of the clear blue sky was Baby Reindeer (Netflix), Richard Gadd’s dramatisation of his days as a struggling comedian and his experience of being stalked. Doubling as a look at the grim reality of the London comedy circuit, the project did not scream overnight success, and by all accounts Netflix was caught unawares by viewers’ enthusiasm (as well, it seems, as by a defamation case from a woman on whom Gadd may have based the stalker). It was a reminder that, in streaming as in life, you really can’t predict anything.
The franchise wars were a bloodbath. The Disney steamroller has slowed to a crawl, with its Star Wars and Marvel franchises clocking up just two new live-action shows apiece in 2024. None made much of an impact, even if Kathryn Hahn’s occasionally charming Marvel spin-off Agatha All Along reversed the dire plunge in quality afflicting the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the atrocious Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
It certainly did much better with critics than Prime Video’s grim return to Middle-earth with series two of its appalling Rings of Power – an insult to Tolkien, the fantasy genre and the concept of prequels. Likewise taking on water was House of the Dragon, HBO/Sky Atlantic’s Game of Thrones brand extension, which fizzled out with a second batch of episodes that mystifyingly skimped on the big battle towards which it had been building for two years. Whether for budgetary reasons or from a general sense of malaise, much TV seems to have given up trying to conjure the wow factor.
Baby Reindeer wasn’t the only release based on real events to register in 2024. In November Disney+ created a stir with Say Nothing, a Tarantino-esque adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book from 2018 about the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, the Belfast mother of 10, in 1972.
Though made with American money, filmed in London and scripted by the guy who rebooted RoboCop in 2014, it has a claim to the title of best Irish TV show of the year. It doesn’t pretend to be a definitive account of the Troubles – though many Americans have, alas, received it as such – and instead zoomed in on the experiences of the famous/notorious (delete according to your perspective) Price sisters, their encounters with a young Gerry Adams, and the death of McConville.
Not everyone liked it. The real Marian Price is suing Disney for portraying her as having been involved in McConville’s murder, which her lawyers say is “not based on a single iota of evidence”.
Say Nothing certainly wasn’t perfect, and its portrayal of the Troubles as both a bit of a lark and a generational tragedy didn’t quite land. But, however the legal action plays out, the series was a riveting showcase for a new generation of Irish acting talent: Hazel Doupe as Marian, Lola Petticrew as the young Dolours Price, Anthony Boyle as the IRA hitman Brendan Hughes and Josh Finan as a baby-faced Adams, on the run from British forces in early-1970s Belfast.
One Irish actor who had an up-and-down year on the small screen was Colin Farrell. He excelled in Apple’s noir thriller Sugar – only for the rug to be pulled out by a bizarre plot twist six episodes on. He did better in The Penguin (Sky Atlantic), a so-so Batman spin-off worth watching for Farrell’s transformation into the slippery, flippery Oedipal gangsta Oswald Cobblepot.
Penguin tried too hard to be a superhero Sopranos and was dull to boot. Yet it was infinitely preferable to the programming coming out of Ireland. What a grim groundhog day it was for RTÉ.
First came the existential horror of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In. Here was the Red Room from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks relocated to the outskirts of Nenagh, the small-screen equivalent of someone standing outside your livingroom window chanting, “Olé, olé, olé!” after you’ve threatened to call the police. The concept of “craic” never felt so traumatising, while the re-creation of the banter-in-a-boozer format from Channel 4’s 1990s staple TFI Friday suggested the national broadcaster is still 30 years off the pace.
The going was also dark on the drama front. There was the choice of a disappointing missing-kid mystery, in The Boy That Never Was, or an undercooked cop caper set largely in New Zealand, in The Gone. Montrose did better with the second series of The Dry, a so-so comedy about an alcoholic middle-class woman (played by the excellent Róisín Gallagher) apparently made largely for a UK audience. (Hence the big idea of Ireland being a nation of dipsos.)
Prime Video had a go at doing Ireland justice on screen by forcing Graham Norton (presumably at gunpoint) to participate in the cataclysmically naff comedy LOL: Last One Laughing, where he was asked to keep a straight face as comics including Aisling Bea, Jason Byrne and Deirdre O’Kane menaced his funny bone.
Meanwhile, Netflix assailed our eyeballs with the toe-curling Bodkin, a comedy-thriller produced by the Obamas of all people and set in a fever-dream west Cork drawn straight from the mystical recesses of the Irish-American mind.
Still, look beyond Ireland and there was much to love. A second run of The Traitors, on the BBC, became a reality-television sensation and will have whetted appetites for the Irish version coming to Virgin Media in 2025. Prime Video’s adaptation of the Fallout video games was a surprising blast, capturing the satirical edge of the source material and giving showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy a redemptive moment after their previous projects West World and The Peripheral had petered out ignominiously.
The year’s most charming show was Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s reboot of Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy-comedy Time Bandits (Apple TV+), in which the Friends star Lisa Kudrow headed a gang of quirky temporal adventurers. Funny, moving and crammed with dinosaurs, cavemen and spear-wielding warriors, it was a hoot. Naturally, nobody watched it, and it has already been cancelled. This was a reminder that, although we can still occasionally have nice things on TV, it generally won’t be for very long.
If there’s a lesson, it’s that the glory days of streaming are over. Most of Netflix’s rivals have slashed budgets, and in several cases they’ve given up trying to compete with the market leader. What they and their terrestrial rivals do next remains to be seen. Television may have become less bombastic in 2024, but it has never been more unpredictable – and that, with luck, is where the excitement will lie in 2025.
