Preacher
AMC's adaptation of the Ennis and Dillon Vertigo comic: Dominic Cooper as an outlaw preacher who commands anyone with a word, Graham McTavish as the Saint of Killers. 4 seasons of blasphemy, blood and jokes.
Genre Drama
Babylon 5
Babylon 5 is the one space station television ever built that behaved like an actual city: a neutral port where ambassadors scheme in corridors, dock workers strike, and a bartender pours whiskey for everyone about to make a terrible decision.…
Ghost Whisperer
Melinda Gordon sees dead people at yard sales and estate liquidations in Grant, Ohio, and spends five seasons on CBS doing what network television does best: a gentle procedural where the mystery is how someone died and the payoff is…
Boardwalk Empire
Atlantic City, 1920, and the rum running machine is humming. Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi, quiet and terrifying in a felt hat) runs the city the way a pit boss runs a floor: everyone is cheating, and he lets them, because…
Doctor Who (2023)
The Disney era handed Russell T Davies the biggest budget in the show's history and Ncuti Gatwa the keys to the TARDIS, and the result is the most confident Doctor Who has looked in a decade. After three 60th anniversary specials gave David Tennant a victory lap, The Church on Ruby Road properly introduced Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor on Christmas 2023: a flashier, flirtier, more emotionally open Doctor with Millie Gibson's found family orphan Ruby Sunday alongside. The production upgrade is immediate, with cinematography and score that finally match the ambition the scripts always had.
Angel
The Buffy spin off moved the vampire with a soul to Los Angeles and quietly became a different, better show than most people remember. Where Buffy was about surviving growing up, Angel is about a grown man trying to atone for a century of atrocities and learning that redemption is not a finish line but a job. Angel Investigations, a detective agency that helps the helpless, gives the series a noir spine Buffy never had, and the early case of the week years use the city's neon rot far better than most LA dramas.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Joss Whedon's high school horror riff did something television had not managed before: it took the dumbest possible premise, a cheerleader kills vampires, and used it as scaffolding for the most literate genre drama of its era. Buffy Summers moves to Sunnydale, a town built on a Hellmouth, and over seven seasons the show treats every monster as a metaphor for something real: first love that literally leaves a scar, the person you sleep with turning into a monster after, a mother's death that no slayer strength can fix. The gimmick was monsters, the subject was growing up.
Brilliant Minds
Zachary Quinto plays Dr. Oliver Wolf, a brilliant, openly gay neurologist loosely inspired by Oliver Sacks, who loses his hospital job for unconventional methods and starts a practice with a team of young residents at Bronx General, treating the strangest cases in medicine. The premise is House by way of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the show commits fully to the case format: face blindness, alien hand syndrome, a woman who cannot recognize her own daughter, each treated as a puzzle with a human attached.
Doctor Odyssey
Ryan Murphy put Joshua Jackson on a cruise ship as Dr. Max Bankman, the new on board physician for the luxury liner The Odyssey, with Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale as his medical team, and the result is the most gloriously unhinged network drama of the season. Every week brings a themed cruise, singles week, plastic surgery week, a Halloween voyage, and every week the ship's compliment of medical catastrophes escalates from implausible to frankly supernatural. There is a throuple. There are multiple mass casualty events. The season ends on a twist about the nature of reality itself that made national news.
Sterling Point
Megan Park, who directed one of the best recent teen films in My Old Ass, created this eight episode coming of age drama for Prime Video, with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage of Gossip Girl pedigree producing and Margot Robbie's LuckyChap aboard. Ella Rubin leads as Annie Jacobson, a 17 year old New Yorker who inherits a remote Canadian island from the estranged grandfather she was never allowed to meet, and travels north with her twin brother, played by Keen Ruffalo, and their adoptive father, played by Jay Duplass, to untangle why her mother cut the family off.