James Poniewozik

It was a year of mild improvement, I think.

Beautiful.

From my standpoint.

Okay.

When I put together my, you know, end of the year best list, most years it is a wrestling match trying to eliminate the last few things to get the list down to 10 or some approximation of that.

I would say last year...

not to crap on 2024 too much, but was one of the few years where, you know, I just, I basically had 10 and I was good.

And one of them was the Olympics.

You know, this year, I think we were, I'm not going to say that it was just a blow the doors off year for television, but...

But it was a much more normal distribution of going down to the wire and cutting things off the list.

So that's a positive note for me.

Oh, there was, where do I start?

Common side effects, severance, the chair company, the lowdown, pluribus.

I mean, you know, I don't need to tell our listeners probably all the reasons that conspiracy theories have had great influence in the larger world, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies.

Conspiracy is a great engine for drama.

There's somebody doing something, something is amiss.

But a lot of the best shows that I watched this year and the more interesting ones, in some way or another, involved often a lone or close-to-lone protagonist trying to unravel something that went way, way beyond them.

And, you know, this was in animation, it was in science fiction, it was in mystery.

There was a lot of it in the water.

Yeah, Severance is one of those streaming shows that comes around like Halley's Comet, and you need to do a refresher course whenever it comes back around.