One of the most watched UK TV shows of 2024, and certainly the most influential, was ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Figures vary but as of 24 November, this four-part drama, which aired in January 2024, has accumulated around 14 million viewers. The true story of the hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted and imprisoned for false accounting and theft due to faulty software, Mr Bates also sparked an outcry in parliament, leading to a public inquiry, new legislation to exonerate wrongly convicted sub-postmasters and the formal withdrawal of ex-Post Office CEO Paula Vennells’s CBE.
However, speaking in April, ITV’s managing director of media and entertainment, Kevin Lygo, effectively described Mr Bates as a failure, saying that viewing figures were significantly less than they’d have been five years ago and the series made a loss of £1 million, meaning it will almost certainly not recoup its budget because there aren’t enough overseas streamers willing to buy the rights: “If you’re in Lithuania, four hours on the British Post Office? Not really, thank you very much.”
If that was bad, there wasn’t much else to celebrate in the UK TV industry in 2024. After 2023 saw the steepest annual decline in UK broadcast TV audiences since records began, with ITV experiencing its worst downturn in ad revenue in 15 years, 2024 just carried on with the bad news.
Netflix continued to dominate, with 27 per cent of the UK streaming market in October. Yet most of its top watches – Bridgerton, Emily in Paris (both 2020-) – were ‘clothes-folding’ shows, ie programmes designed to be unchallenging and easy to follow, making them ideal to watch while doing something else. It perhaps indicated viewers were as much in need of ambient distraction as public outcry. But Netflix wasn’t solely about wallpaper offerings. Also in its top ten was 3 Body Problem, the sci-fi series by Game of Thrones (2011-19) showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, a show that this writer argued back in the spring was superior to the critical favourite Shōgun. I still believe that. Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’s ten-part adaptation of James Clavell’s 17th-century Japanese drama was an exercise in lavish, poorly lit, unemotional spectacle and elaborate, sprawling world-building that carried itself with such ponderous self-importance that watching it felt like an act of penance at the doomy altar of prestige TV.
Despite a few dodgy casting decisions, 3 Body Problem was the direct opposite, a bright, rich, spectacular show that also felt grounded, its flawed characters fleshed out with believable humour and bathos. In fact, all of this writer’s favourite Netflix shows of 2024, whether the second season of Debora Cahn’s wittily self-aware political thriller The Diplomat (2023-), the stealth-feminism of Meredith Scardino’s brilliant sitcom-musical Girls5Eva (2021-) or head writer Nicole Taylor’s One Day, a euphoric yet sardonic adaptation of David Nicholls’s 2009 novel, possessed a warmth of character and dialogue that felt human, real and necessary. That’s arguably the reason I disliked two other Netflix hits, Baby Reindeer and Ripley. The first, Richard Gadd’s seven-part adaptation of his autobiographical one-man show about a relationship with his stalker, Martha, just felt callous. This was partly due to its toxic misogyny but also Netflix’s dereliction of responsibility to Gadd and the real ‘Martha’, its presentation of the show as a “true story” and its failure to verify Gadd’s version of events. There was also a heartless feel to Steven Zaillian’s neo-noir adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. To these eyes it was the worst kind of prestige TV: plodding, charmless, sexless and pretentious, with seemingly no understanding of either the original novel or the artistry of film noir.
Another show that misjudged the mood and artistry of film noir was Mark Protosevich’s Sugar (Apple TV+), in which Colin Farrell played a private investigator probing the disappearance of a movie producer’s granddaughter. It also contained the worst and most poorly paced plot twist of the year (no spoilers). But Apple TV+ was also home to three of the year’s best shows in the shape of Slow Horses (2022-), Bill Lawrence’s deliciously macabre Carl Hiaasen adaptation Bad Monkey, and Season 2 of Soo Hugh’s Pachinko (2022-), which all showed that it is still possible to make good prestige TV so long as it has a propulsive plot, believable, three-dimensional characters and a cinematographer who doesn’t think that brown, crimson and teal are the only three colours available. A dun colour palette was arguably the only drawback of Fargo (2014-) (Amazon Prime Video), which saw a fifth-season return to form for Noah Hawley’s crime drama thanks chiefly to a powerhouse performance by Juno Temple as revenging Minnesotan housewife Dorothy ‘Dot’ Lyon.
With shows like Reacher, The Boys, Fallout and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Prime was home to some of the most visually striking TV. Mr. & Mrs Smith was the subject of a column I wrote in April, arguing that this comedy spy drama – in which Donald Glover and Maya Erskine played a New York ‘couple’ working as ‘high-risk’ assassins – managed to work as both a playful romcom and a subversive thriller about the gig economy. It’s hard to think of a show from 2024 that operated so effectively on so many levels. It provided more pleasure than all of Disney+’s disappointing Marvel and Star Wars spin-offs put together.
HBO showed Disney+ how a franchise should be done, with Lauren LeFranc’s crime-dynasty drama The Penguin (screened by Sky in the UK), which had the simple but high-concept idea of placing a Batman villain within a Sopranos-esque criminal universe. And if Colin Farrell gave one of the worst performances of 2024 in Sugar then no matter, as his prosthetics-heavy turn as insecure, small-time mobster Oz Cobb was one of the best.
There were, however, some good reasons to watch Disney+, including its darkly satirical adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 bonkbuster Rivals as well as two true crime dramas – Under the Bridge and Say Nothing – that attempted to re-examine morally complex historical events from a new ideological perspective. They also had Death and Other Details, a critically lambasted locked-room mystery which benefited from one of the finest performances of the year, in Violett Beane’s reluctant detective, and from Mandi Line’s exquisite costume designs.
Also, along with Disney+’s Only Murders in the Building (2021-), Sky/Now’s Based on a True Story (2023-), BBC1’s Ludwig and Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, Death and Other Details took its cue from true crime podcasts and super-successful puzzle-solving shows like The Traitors (2022-) and Taskmaster (2015‑). If that is a new trend, shows that involve audiences in puzzles, it perhaps demonstrates a need to engage with TV on a more active level, rather than either vegging out in front of ambient telly or being subjected to the ponderous world-building of prestige TV. In a year of bad industry news, that can only be a good thing. Can’t it?
