The 10 Best TV Performances of 2024

This adaptation of Laura Lippman’s period novel split its focus between two women whose lives kept intersecting: a Jewish divorcée played by Natalie Portman, and a single Black mother played by Queen’s Gambit alum Moses Ingram. The miniseries was a rare stumble for Portman, whose performance came off as more mannered and guarded than the material seemed to need. Ingram, on the other hand, commanded the screen in every moment she appeared, masterfully embodying a woman searching desperately for a way out of the corner into which her life had painted her.

Late in the breezy political drama’s second-season finale, Janney — playing the nefarious sitting vice president, whom Keri Russell’s frazzled ambassador has been recruited to replace — drags a giant map into a room, grabs a piece of coal from a nearby fireplace, and spends the next three and a half minutes using the map to school Russell on how geopolitics actually work. It’s like the inverse of all those early West Wing scenes where one of the men would have to explain our political system to Janney’s CJ, who was [checks notes] White House press secretary. Diplomat creator Debora Cahn cut her teeth on The West Wing — mostly in the later seasons, when CJ stopped requiring so much hand-holding — so she clearly knew what she was getting when she brought Janney in to kick ass, take names, and tower over Russell’s Kate Wylerl in both a physical and emotional sense. Janney was only in two episodes this season, in a classic case of leaving the audience wanting so much more.

Jones has spent much of her career playing the straight woman to more outsized performers, most famously as Beautiful Ann on Parks and Recreation. With this odd sci-fi comedy, where she played a woman using a household robot to help her grieve the apparent death of her husband and son in a plane crash, it was Jones who got to be the big, hot mess for once. The more prickly and ridiculous character suited her very well. As a story, Sunny was a bit all over the map. As a chance for its star to demonstrate that she could sell jokes just as well as she could set them up, it was a lot of fun.

No scenery is left unchewed by the Oscar winner’s performance in Alfonso Cuarón’s tale of a bitter widower using his late wife’s unpublished roman á clef about their son’s death for a revenge plot against the woman (Cate Blanchett) they blame for it all. Kline adopts a snide English accent, stumbles around in his wife’s ratty cardigan, and mimes tossing grenades over his shoulder after each new phase of his plan is complete, among other big choices. Cuarón clearly doesn’t want subtlety from Kline, and the actor delivers exactly what’s needed to help distinguish this fable about truth versus fiction from something that we’re meant to treat as “real,” however we define that. Kline mostly does voice acting on Bob’s Burgers these days; what a treat it was to have him doing such vivid, funny, unrestrained live-action work.

For most of the hangout comedy’s first season, sitcom veteran McGinley (Happy Days, Married… With Children) was used sparingly but effectively, as the guy who sat on the couch and didn’t do anything for the majority of a scene, then said something cutting and hilarious right at the end. This year, he’s gotten a lot more to do, and done a lot more with it. The Shrinking writers have turned his character’s likability and enthusiasm into a kind of superpower, but they’ve also given him dramatic beats to play, like a storyline where his good nature was stretched past its limits when his wife kissed an ex-boyfriend. Shrinking has one of the best and deepest ensembles on television, and almost everyone in it is deserving of a spotlight. But this has improbably become a career-redefining job for McGinley, and he’s made the most of it.

In the various Batman movies, the actors who don Bruce Wayne’s cape and cowl often wind up being upstaged by the ones who get to play the Dark Knight’s more colorful villains. So when it became time for one of those villains — Colin Farrell, back in the fat suit and other makeup — to reprise his small role from the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson The Batman film, it seemed only fair that he in turn would be upstaged now that the antagonist had become the protagonist. While much of The Penguin played as Mob drama karaoke, Cristin Milioti was riveting as Sofia Falcone, who began the season seeming like an unhinged supervillain and was gradually revealed to be among the more tragic victims of this corner of Gotham City. Since she played the titular mom in the final season of How I Met Your Mother, Milioti has consistently given some of the most interesting and surprising performances on television, and that very much continued here. Farrell will be back on the big screen for the next Pattinson movie; Milioti has more than earned the same shot.

For the most part, we’re trying to avoid duplication between these various best-of-the-year lists, and we already praised Shōgun as the second-best show of the year overall. But exceptions must be made for exceptional work, and Sawai’s understated, devastating turn as Lady Mariko qualifies. Mariko is a prisoner of various circumstances: forbidden by her lord from committing ritualized suicide like the rest of her dishonored family, trapped in a marriage to a brute she hates, required to befriend a crude English sailor for whom she develops unexpected feelings, and forced by the constraints of feudal Japanese society to keep most of her roiling emotions to herself. So Sawai has to say volumes with a slight shift in expression, body language, or tone. And she does it, becoming the heartbeat and most memorable character of an instant classic.

Few actors can spew BS with the speed and good-natured conviction of Vaughn, and few roles in his career have taken advantage of that particular skill as well as this one. As disgraced maybe-ex-cop Andrew Yancy, who keeps talking himself into and out of trouble in and around the Florida Keys, Vaughn set the tone for the rollicking good time that Bad Monkey provided throughout its 10-episode run.