David Bianculli
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
One, HBO's Task, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with lots of emotional baggage, played by Mark Ruffalo.
Another, Netflix's Department Q, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with even more emotional baggage, played by Matthew Goode.
His character is returning to work after being shot and almost killed.
And at first, he's openly hostile to his police-appointed therapist, played by Kelly MacDonald, who's as sharp and brittle as he is.
And maybe it's just me, but this year I definitely gravitated to dramatic shows that made me uneasy.
It was another great season for Netflix's Black Mirror, and the end-of-year final episode of another dark Netflix fantasy series, Stranger Things, is eagerly awaited by many.
Including me, because I've seen all the new episodes leading up to it, but the finale is being kept under wraps.
That show's been around since 2016, almost a decade.
But other terrific genre shows were new takes on old ideas.
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein on Netflix was an excellent and very different adaptation.
And what Noah Hawley did by reinventing the Alien movie franchise for the FX TV series Alien Earth was thrilling and, at times, truly scary.
And still churning out weekly episodes, brilliant ones, is Pluribus, the new indescribably original Apple TV sci-fi series from Vince Gilligan.
Some were set behind the scenes of showbiz, like the new Apple TV series The Studio, starring Seth Rogen as a bumbling but well-meaning studio head, and the returning HBO Max series Hacks, starring Jean Smart as a female comic landing a job as a TV talk show host.
The other comedies were lighthearted mysteries benefiting greatly from their veteran cast members.
Hulu's Only Murders in the Building and Netflix's A Man on the Inside.
Both of those shows made me feel good, which is a lot to ask of any TV show these days.
Nonfiction TV also offered many excellent options this year.
Artistic profiles to seek out from 2025 include Apple TV's Mr. Scorsese about film director Martin Scorsese and HBO's Pee Wee Is Himself about actor Paul Rubens.