From evil penguins to globe-trotting jackals, here are the TV shows that we were animals for this year.

We’ve already covered off our favourite local television moments of the year, but there is still so much more to dive into beyond our televisual shores. It was predicted that 2024 would be a rough year for television, what with the big streamers cutting their commissioning budgets and the ripple effect of the 2023 writers’ strike still being felt. Nevertheless, our square eyes persisted and we at The Spinoff still managed to watch a bunch of good stuff.

The Traitors NZ (ThreeNow)

Quite possibly the best season of reality TV we’ve ever produced, The Traitors NZ took things to a whole new level of drama. From pig trotters to faux funerals, seances to destroyed alliances, this was peak reality television and a real reminder of what we’re going to lose with the severe reduction in locally-produced content coming in 2025. While we may never get to see a fedora-wearing, cane-brandishing Paul Henry wander around a round table ever again, I will never forget the sheer joy of The Traitors NZ season two. Like the many faithful that fell along the way, may it rest in peace. / Stewart Sowman-Lund

The Penguin (Neon)

I’m not going to pretend The Penguin is Sopranos-level prestige television, but it was really, unexpectedly good. With Marvel twisting in the wind, unable to figure out what comes next after you kill off Iron Man, DC Studios snuck up from behind and offered a new, darker direction for tired superhero franchises. Serving as the spin-off sequel to 2022’s The Batman, the show charts Ozwald Cobb’s rise in Gotham City’s criminal underworld. I knew Colin Farrell had been cast as Cobb, but he was so unrecognisable that I exclaimed “Oh my God, it’s Colin Farrell” halfway through the first episode. While Oz is definitely not a good guy, Farrell’s rich and layered performance puts him among great TV antiheroes of our time like Tony Soprano or Walter White. Cristin Milioti is a captivating and menacing Sophia Falcon, and showrunner Lauren LeFranc’s imagined Gotham is the perfect backdrop for a brutal psychological thriller. / Anna Rawhiti-Connell 

The Bear (Disney+)

Before The Bear I never thought much about the city of Chicago, or meaty saucy sandwiches like the ones you can find there. Now, I think about Chicago and sandwiches all the time, specifically the ones made by the OG staff of Chicago Beef at the sandwich window in the side of the flash as restaurant now called The Bear. Season three left us with a lot of loose ends. What did that review say? Was it a rave? Was it a tear down? Is Carmy going to make good with Claire? Has Syd had a gut’s full? Is she going to bail? How is Lisa? Is Richie going to ask the one from the posh restaurant out?

The Bear is stressful TV but the world needs it. There’s an honesty in the storytelling that you’re either going to love or be annoyed by: I love that there’s a repetitive upping of the stakes. I love that the season wasn’t clear cut and that it didn’t follow a predictable arc. I love that each episode is its own thing, has its own style and focus. It reminds me of Girls, which was chronically misunderstood when it came out but is now enjoying a renaissance. Some days I think I could watch The Bear indefinitely as both escape and a jolt to the senses. Sign of a great show. / Claire Mabey

Industry (Neon)

I stumbled on season one of Industry by accident and watched with varying levels of interest. I returned for season two because I was a little invested but still watched with one eye, the other on my phone. Season three had me sitting bolt upright, completely hooked and prepared to say that I think Industry is one of the best shows of the year. The show, set in the amoral, excessive, money-soaked and drug-fuelled world of high finance in London, has burned slowly and is now blazing. Someone let the writers off their chains, and they’ve managed to make watching the world burn fun. The third season tackles the green energy boom, sexual politics, plain politics, class, corruption and consequence. The characters are revolting and self-centred, and I couldn’t get enough. / ARC

The Olympics 

Why does the Olympics only happen every four years? I would happily watch the Olympics every day of my life, although I suppose that would kind of defeat the purpose. For almost an entire month I was completely nocturnal, staying up to watch anything and everything, even, god forgive me, the golf. There were so many great moments. Katie Ledecky! Simone Biles! Mondo Duplantis! Imane Khelif. And let us not forget Australian icon, Ray Gun. The 2026 Winter Olympics cannot come soon enough. / Hera Lindsay Bird

The Day of The Jackal (TVNZ+)

It is a hard graft for a television show to get me to put my phone down and actually pay attention to it these days, but spy thriller The Day of the Jackal got me right between the eyes. Starring Eddie Redmayne as a globe-trotting assassin with a truly opulent collection of wigs, it quickly sets up a worldwide cat and mouse scenario as Bianca (Lashana Lynch), a plucky gun expert at MI5, chases his tantalising Jackal tail. There are tremendous action set pieces that would leave Christopher Nolan quaking, unspooling backstories that drive the stakes sky high, and I truly can’t say enough about the wigs (and bald caps). A show so good I actually had to stop it halfway to properly savour it over the holidays – and I can’t wait to dive back in. / Alex Casey

Rivals (Disney+)

Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, a 10-part series of stupendously long novels set amongst the posh English horsey set, are objectively nonsensical. Everyone is constantly drunk, always rooting (though rarely their partners), and even the most likeable characters commit serious crimes which prompt little more than an exasperated shrug by way of comeuppance. Rivals is the second book in the series, which sees the anti-hero Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) retire from showjumping to become an MP (Tory, of course) and compete with ever higher stakes against his media mogul rival Lord Baddingham (a conniving David Tennant). It’s a tone-perfect 80s period drama and very faithful to the feel of Cooper’s novels, ie totally batshit, a blast of pure campy escapism. This is probably objectively bad television, but there was no show I enjoyed watching more in 2024. / Duncan Greive

Ren Faire 

Hands down the best documentary/documentary series I have ever seen. Not only is the subject: a dynastic struggle for ownership of one of Texas’s biggest renaissance fairs, extremely close to my heart, but I guarantee you have never seen a documentary quite like this. In the hands of an ordinary documentary filmmaker, this would be brilliant. The subjects of the documentary are fascinating, and the premise – a chaotic power struggle over an extremely eccentric and ailing entrepreneur’s self-made medieval empire – utterly gripping. But everything about the execution of this documentary, from the lighting to the editing to the sound design, makes this a completely transcendental experience. I knew this was a documentary going in, but after the first episode, both my partner and I were so convinced it was scripted, we had to repeatedly double-check the Wikipedia page. It’s sort of like Succession directed by Dario Argento, populated by the kind of characters you only meet in a George Saunders story. Only, somehow, real. So insane. So fun. My best watch of 2024. / HLB

Hacks (TVNZ+)

Take one cynical millennial comedy writer, cast aside from the industry after doing a dodgy tweet, and pair her up with a cynical Boomer Vegas comedian hanging onto relevance for dear life. What do you get? Perhaps the best onscreen pair of misfit women in recent years. Sweeping the Emmys this year (sorry to The Bear), Hacks continues to get better and better with every season as the testy professional and personal relationship between Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) erodes and repairs on repeat. In season three, the supporting cast get their time to shine too, with Jean’s complex relationship with her daughter (Sweet Dee from It’s Always Sunny) laid particularly bare. The series also tackles so much nuanced stuff around MeToo and cancel culture, ageing and ambition, show business and sexuality, without ever feeling preachy, while still somehow being incredibly funny. And never hack! / AC

Mr Bates and the Post Office (TVNZ+)

No other TV show made me more mad this year than Mr Bates and The Post Office, the astonishing based-on-a-true-story British drama about the prosecution of hundreds of innocent post office workers and the ensuing government cover-up. It’s hard to choose what’s more infuriating: the way working people’s lives were destroyed, or how people in power chose to ignore the issue, or the way a faulty IT system was used to punish those who’d done nothing wrong. The four part-series features an incredible cast – Toby Jones plays the doggedly determined Mr Bates, ably supported by Monica Dolan, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Katherine Kelly – but what’s most powerful is the simple way the story is told, letting the full horror of this miscarriage of justice speak for itself. As Anna Rawhiti-Connell wrote in her review: “It’s a testament to the writing and the cast that a series that hinges on phone calls, visuals of computer screens, binders of paper and meetings in remote country halls and bleak government offices manages to be so gripping, human and emotional.” It’s a must-watch, mostly so we never let anything like this happen again. / Tara Ward

Mr McMahon (Netflix)

If you were guessing at which form of popular culture would be most instructive for contemporary American politics 25 years ago, you would have got pretty long odds for professional wrestling. The WWE was a carnivalesque curiosity which emerged triumphant from a patchwork of competing regional organisations in the mid-80s, minting stars like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior. What politics it had was nationally patriotic, manifested in villains like the Iron Sheik. Where it connected with broader mainstream culture, it was as a freakshow, these ‘roided up men mountains making arenas go crazy in flyover states. 

Flash forward to 2024 and Hogan is headlining the RNC and senior WWE-exec Linda McMahon is the incoming Secretary of Education – while the combined endorsements of almost every pop and movie star from Taylor Swift down meant nothing. Mr McMahon is a riveting six-part documentary about the berserk rise of the WWE and its commissioner Vince McMahon. But it’s also about contemporary American culture, and how it was made. / DG

Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

Nothing since The Americans has really been able to scratch that espionage itch. I always get excited for the next great spy drama, only to be bitterly disappointed after watching the latest Cumberbatch thriller that feels more like a Burberry trenchcoat advertisement than pure le Carré. Thank god for Slow Horses. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a TV series so much. I had such a good time watching this exceptional series about a group of M15 rejects that I went back and read all the equally delightful Mick Herron books, on which the series is based. Memorable characters. Brilliant dialogue. While it doesn’t have the gravitas of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it does share the most important thing of all: Gary Oldman. / HLB

Married at First Sight Australia (ThreeNow)

At least once a month for our My Life in TV segment, I have to listen to a different television personality tell me how much they hate reality television and swear on their families lives that they will never watch a moment of Married at First Sight. As an impartial journalist, I of course say nothing to change their mind, but it saddens me how much they are missing out on. This year’s MAFSAU brought us human sunbeam Lucinda Light and Tim ‘The Tin Man’, the latter of which I would argue is an even more significant contribution to The Wizard of Oz canon this year than Wicked. She was an open-hearted motivational speaker from Bondi, he was an emotionally repressed man with a huge tattoo of THE TIN MAN because he believed HE DIDN’T HAVE A HEART. Together, they made some of the most electric television of the year, and plumbed the depths of the human experience (AKA crying at the end of a driveway) in a way that scripted television only wishes. / AC

Fantasmas (Neon)

This year brought two pearls from Julio Torres: Problemista (as seen in the NZIFF) and the HBO show Fantasmas. The Salvadoran-American writer, comedian and actor is leaning deep into magical realism. He continues to play different versions of himself as leads, casting fantastical stories as autobiographic allegories. Fantasmas follows Julio, an artist from an undisclosed Latin American country trying to stay in the US. He’s having problems, both practical and ideological, attaining official proof of existence. Each episode is a collection of skits and guest appearances as Julio searches for his tiny oyster charm, which will prove his mole has grown, as eviction notices pile up at his door. The art of filmmaking is on show, with obviously constructed sets, non-human characters voiced by Torres and reality a line to be played with. There was nothing I enjoyed more than escaping into this world in the long dark evenings of winter.

When you finish the show, it’s not over. Head to his Instagram account, apparently run by the little blue Purilinpinpina, to become one of the “little consumers” of his off-kilter content. You may be convinced to buy a t-shirt or two. / Gabi Lardies

Friends Like Her (ThreeNow)

I reckon Friends Like Her was one of our best local shows of 2024. Set in Kaikōura after the devastating 2015 earthquake, this thriller tells the story of two best friends (played by the wonderful Morgana O’Reilly and Tess Haubrinch) and a broken surrogacy agreement that divides an already traumatised community. It was a treat to see a New Zealand series that focused on the relationship between two dynamic women, who each lead full and complex lives above and beyond their roles as wives and mothers. There’s shades of Big Little Lies here, and with a stellar cast that includes Vinnie Bennett, Jarod Rawiri, Vanessa Rare and Elizabeth Hawthorne plus Sarah Kate Lynch’s vibrant script, Friends Like Her reminds us that there’s plenty of big drama to be found in small town Aotearoa. / TW

Tomorrow: The Spinoff’s favourite music moments of 2024