This list may not be as definitive as our best-of-the-year list — no human can watch every episode of TV made in a year — and it includes many less-than-famous titles. But for my money, it is always the most fun list to put together. What you learn, spending a year watching series after series that you may never end up writing about, is that greatness can pop up anywhere, sometimes where you would expect it, sometimes in an offbeat documentary or an off-the-radar streaming curio.
A critic ends every year with a pocketful of these randomly acquired gems, and it’s a pleasure to dump them out on the table for you here. Enjoy, and feel free to share your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK
‘Baby Reindeer’
Episode 4
Created by and starring Richard Gadd, and based on his life, “Baby Reindeer” knocked me out this year with its gnarled and uncompromising depictions of stalking, sexual assault, shame and ambition. Episode 4 is among the more gripping, disturbing hours of TV I’ve ever seen, as Gadd’s character, Donny, finds himself being groomed, drugged, raped and manipulated by a man he revered, a man who promised to help his career. “Reindeer” rejects anything resembling tidy morality and instead digs into the complex mechanisms of victimhood, the various distorting lenses of abuse. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONS
‘The Bear’
Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Napkins’
This season of “The Bear” was a meal better gazed upon than eaten, dazzling on the screen but torpid in its story. But “Napkins” took us back, both in narrative time and to the energy and go-for-broke emotion of the earlier seasons. It follows Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) on a humiliating job hunt and through the doors of the title restaurant — then still an Italian beef sandwich joint — for a good cry, a restorative meal and ultimately a job. A tribute to the power of work to provide purpose and restaurants to provide restoration, “Napkins” stepped back from the season’s abstractions and offered a meaty mouthful. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK
‘Blue Lights’
Season 1, Episode 5: ‘The Q Word’
The Northern Irish series “Blue Lights” is the best new police procedural to come around in a while, and it finds fresh ways to go through the genre’s familiar paces. One young cop continually turns down assignments, and we quickly see that she is both entitled and — much more unusual for this kind of show — a coward. In this taut episode, she found herself in the field and was forced to make a choice, in a moment that was truly shattering. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE
‘Bob’s Burgers’
Season 15, Episode 4: ‘For Whom the Doll Toes’
I put an episode of “Bob’s Burgers” on this list every year, in part because it is my favorite TV show but, more pertinent, because it is one of the last really good episodic series. Episodes of the best serial shows, woven into and depending upon larger story lines, don’t need to stand out; episodic series must present themselves whole, distilled to their essence, every week. Here the youngest Belcher sister, Louise, mounted a murder mystery using dolls as a way of atoning for a wrong done to her brother. The episode embodied the show’s sweetness and rue. (Streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.) HALE
‘Chimp Crazy’
Episode 2, ‘Gone Ape’
Over its four episodes, the documentary series “Chimp Crazy” covers the bizarre saga of a chimp called Tonka, who was in a bunch of movies before winding up in the custody of Tonia Haddix, a chimp enthusiast and participant in the exotic animal trade. The show weaves together Tonka’s story with the stories of other chimps raised by humans who eventually, often fatally, attack their owners — the most infamous of which, perhaps, is that of a Connecticut chimp named Travis, retold in “Gone Ape” as background for Haddix’s legal conflict and Tonka’s seeming disappearance. Haddix claims Tonka died; she weeps and wails, swearing to that under oath. And then in the closing seconds of the episode, after declaring victory over PETA, she marches down to her basement … where Tonka is held in a cell. As with many parts of “Chimp Crazy,” it is both shocking and totally not shocking. (Streaming on Max.) LYONS
‘Constellation’
Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Through the Looking Glass’
With “Alice in Wonderland” as its spirit guide, “Constellation” combined a puzzle-piece science-fiction mystery and a dark-woods fairy tale in a story that got at the fantastical nature of modern science. This is the episode where the two strands came together and revealed their secrets, with young girls going through actual looking glasses, and the result was fairly magical. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) HALE
‘The Curse’
Season 1, Episode 10: ‘Green Queen’
If you tell me you saw this coming, I will not believe you. One of the most fruitfully perplexing experiments of 2023 ended, early in 2024, with a literal upending that sent Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder), one half of a husband-and-wife reality-TV home-design team, hurtling to his death in space as his personal field of gravity was reversed. Was it magical realism? Religious allegory? A pretentious cop-out? Plant your feet in whichever argument you wish, but the conclusion was haunting and unforgettable in a way that too little TV was this year. (Streaming on Paramount+.) PONIEWOZIK
‘Expats’
Episode 5, ‘Central’
Extra-long episodes of dreary dramas are often a weepy slog, but “Central,” tipping the scales at an hour and 40 minutes, is gorgeous and knotty, filled to the brim. The mini-series, created and directed by Lulu Wang and based on the book “The Expatriates” by Janice Y.K. Lee, is set in Hong Kong and follows the fallout from a little boy’s disappearance, but “Central” turns the focus from the wealthy, grieving American family to the “helpers” — domestic laborers mostly from the Philippines. So many scenes in the episode happen on thresholds, both grand doorways and darkened hallways, all these instances of coming and going but never really staying. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.) LYONS
‘The Lesson’
Season 1, Episode 1
Scenes of students and teachers sparring with one another across gaps of age, race, gender, authority and wokeness are a staple of contemporary TV. The opening episode of this Israeli series was built around a particularly tense and heartbreaking example, as an argument over an assignment turned into a harsh exchange about the rights — to space, to services, to existence — of Arab Israelis. Everything that happened in this astringent drama flowed from the headlong collision of the teacher’s facile liberalism and his young students’ anger and intolerance. (Streaming on ChaiFlicks.) HALE
‘Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office’
Episode 1
This four-part mini-series, based on an appalling true story, covers both the infuriating indignity of false accusations and the necessity of solidarity and support in the face of injustice. Some shows spend their whole runs never getting as precise and full a portrait of their characters as “Bates” does in its first installment. The show introduces us to various sub-postmasters whose Post Office-issued kiosks are malfunctioning, a Kafka-esque nightmare from multiple angles, including a criminal one. Each victim believes he or she is the only victim, and some go bankrupt, go to jail, die by suicide, abandon their lives. The first episode ends with the inaugural meeting of what eventually becomes a support and advocacy group, and the ripple of relief that courses through the characters washes over the viewer, too. (Stream it on PBS Passport.) LYONS
‘Penelope’
Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Two’
This under-the-radar girl-vs.-nature story, about a teen runaway (a magnetic Megan Stott) surviving in the wilderness, was at its best when it said nothing. This early episode, with scant dialogue other than the title character talking to herself, reached a climax with her marshaling her wits and patience to build and harness a fire, the sequence set to an electronic score that pulsed and breathed like the bellows of life. The name “Penelope” may suggest a reference to the Odyssey myth, but you can call her Prometheus. (Stream it on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK
‘Ren Faire’
Episode 2, ‘Make Big Choices’
This three-part documentary series, directed by Lance Oppenheim, follows the succession crisis at the Texas Renaissance Festival. Its mercurial founder, known as King George to all his subjects, says he wants to retire. “You see why I suffer from the gross inadequacies of the human race?” he laments after he notices one employee not wearing a hat. All the underlings scramble in their quest for King George’s crown, but none scramble quite so hard as Jeff, the most prostrated and devoted courtier. “We’re in Act V of ‘King Lear,’” he says. Each installment of “Ren Faire” has its highlights, but “Choices” is burned into my brain by Jeff’s doleful confession to his wife: “Of course it’s folly,” he admits. The episode ends with a hallucinatory conversation with a humanoid dragon, just part of what made “Ren Faire” so cinematic and engrossing, this easy language with collective fantasy. (Stream it on Max.) LYONS
‘Sunny’
Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Who’s in the Box?’
Bias disclosure: If you make a story that involves a robot, I will invariably prefer the machine to any human character. This was absolutely true of this whimsical thriller, set in near-future Japan, whose expressive title figure (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) was suspected of committing foul play. The penultimate episode delved into her (I use the series’s pronouns) psyche — and thus, that of her creator (Hidetoshi Nishijima) — rendering her confusion and guilt through a digital hallucination that took the form of a bizarre game show. Sometimes artificial intelligence and human creativity can coexist. (Stream it on Apple TV+.) PONIEWOZIK
‘The Sympathizer’
Episode 4: ‘Give Us Some Good Lines’
Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of this Viet Thanh Nguyen novel was many things — thriller, satire, requiem — but it was also a meta-story about how Hollywood devours the horrors of the world and excretes them as clichés. In this showpiece episode, the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a North Vietnamese double agent and expat, lands a job assisting the gonzo director of a Vietnam War movie (Robert Downey Jr., in one of several roles), who asks him to provide “the perspective of the Vietnamese people.” The movie shoot ends up being an absurd, traumatic reprise of the war in miniature, ending with the Captain’s being injured in the simulated explosion of a village. History repeats, this time as a tour-de-farce. (Stream it on Max.) PONIEWOZIK
‘3 Body Problem’
Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Judgment Day’
There were a lot of ideas in this slow-burn alien-invasion saga — whose title concerns the perils of living in a three-sun solar system — but maybe the most interesting was ethical rather than scientific: How hard hearted can you be, must you be, in the face of an existential threat? In this midseason episode, new nanofiber technology is put to military use, precision cutting a massive ship full of alien sympathizers (including families with children) into bloody deli slices. The gee-whiz awe of the visual effects collides with gut-level horror at the slaughter, and the matter-of-fact presentation of the destruction leaves you to decide which reaction wins out. (Stream it on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK
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