The 12 Best TV Performances of 2024
These actors found fresh depths in returning characters or introduced us to new ones with confidence and style.
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Even in a year when so much TV was mid, creatives still managed to push the boundaries of this fickle and confusing medium. The actors in particular found fresh depths in characters with whom viewers were already acquainted or introduced us to new ones with confidence and style. Acting, at its best, holds a mirror up to humanity and shows us ourselves, the parts we recognize and the ones we wish we didn’t. Every performance on this list did this to a delightful degree. There’s nothing mid about that. —Jen Chaney
Marisa Abela, Industry
Well bred and totally inept at her job — but incredibly good at manipulating other people — Yasmin Kara-Hanani is simultaneously one of the most exasperating and most pathetic characters on TV. As the least valuable (in terms of ability) and most valuable (in terms of connections and, well, actual net worth) junior employee at Pierpoint and Co., Yasmin has always been a fascinating mix of very posh contradictions thanks to Marisa Abela’s ability to find a softness in her, even as she leans into the character’s cruelest qualities (no one can dom a man with a whisper like her). This season brought Yasmin to the fore as she faced a media scandal and courted the attentions of Kit Harington; by the finale, she was breaking hearts like a Henry James heroine. You understand her, even as she locks herself in a gilded cage. —Jackson McHenry
Jacob Anderson, Interview With the Vampire
Louis de Pointe du Lac has had a rough go of immortality. He has broken contact with his family, relocated to Paris, tried to be a good father, dealt with not one by two toxic boyfriends, and endured the self-important nonsense of a theater company. All three members of this AMC series’ toxic throuple deserve respect, including Assad Zaman’s chill (and chilly) Armand and Sam Reid’s tornado of a performance as Lestat, but Anderson warrants immense credit for grounding the series, if not in naturalism, then a specific kind of lilting, high-gothic grandeur. We, like Eric Bogosian’s raggedy journalist Daniel Molloy, must be seduced by Louis’s tale. We must feel for Louis, even when the convolutions of the plot can bend toward silliness. Everything, from Anderson’s honeyed voice and strutting posture to the wail of desperation he lets loose when things fall apart, ensures that we do. —J.M.
Tadanobu Asano, Shōgun
Lord Kashigi Yabushige is a scoundrel, a deviant, and a man obsessed with watching. He boils a foe alive for sport, observes a popular concubine sleeping with his second-in-command, and keeps an eye on all the lines of power crisscrossing through Japan in order to manipulate them for his own gain. Yet he’s also a show-off, a loudmouth, a fool — the kind of guy who can’t help but make an inappropriate joke or boast ineffectively. Through squints, yells, and outsize reactions, Tadanobu Asano created a character whose interiority is always roiling and reaching, someone who finds life unfulfilling and doesn’t understand why this is all there is. Yabushige is constantly rotating his loyalties to survive the war between the Five Regents for rule of Japan, and when that begins to seem impossible, he seeks a way to secure an honorable death — which also becomes impossible as his betrayals are discovered. There’s something incredibly relatable about his desperate grasping for meaning, and Yabushige transforms over the course of the season from a character you’re watching because you want to figure out his next move to a character you’re watching simply because he’s so compelling. Producer Hiroyuki Sanada has joked about Shōgun’s creative team finding a way to bring back Yabushige via ghost or flashback for the series’ second season. May I add: Please? — Roxana Hadadi
Bridget Everett, Somebody Somewhere
Watch any exceptional actor and you’ll notice how fully and physically dialed in they are to their surroundings and scene partners. They don’t just say words; they actually pay attention when others speak. In Somebody Somewhere, Bridget Everett listens with such focus, and seemingly so little preconception of what the other characters are about to say, that it feels like she’s discovering her words in real time — even though, in many cases, Everett helped write them herself. In the series finale of the bighearted series in which Everett stars, Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) tells Everett’s Sam that they’ve both forgotten their late sister Holly’s birthday. Everett takes a moment to hear that information before it registers on her face, and once it does, her gaze shifts away from Tricia, as though Sam is physically searching for an explanation that will justify their mental slip-up. Even when Everett takes a moment to herself to, say, look at her cell phone and wrestle with whether to respond to a text from her crush, her expression — eyes downcast and mouth parked in a stoic, almost meditative expression — shows that her internal emotional gears are actively processing. As tremendous as Everett is in these quiet moments, she’s just as inspiring when she simply lets it rip, as in the closing moments of the series when she belts Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb” in a bring-the-house-down final bow for the ages. In every choice she makes, Everett captures a woman attempting to seek joy and surprising herself when she finds it. —J.C.
Dakota Fanning, The Perfect Couple
When Abby Winfield walks into a book party for her very famous, very wealthy author mother-in-law, she scans the room and declares, “Jesus, it looks like Lily Pulitzer projectile vomited all over this place.” Dakota Fanning delivers this line with just the right splash of mean-girl snark, demonstrating the degree to which she understands that this series, about a gilded family grappling with a tragic death that takes place in the middle of a Fourth of July wedding weekend, is a dark comedy about how fucking ridiculous all these people are. Abby has married into a family of narcissistic, melodramatic one-percenters who anesthetize themselves with booze and weed, so she sees herself as separate from them, even as she revels in the privilege her status as a family member gives her. Abby is shifty, prowling the Winfields’ Nantucket estate with wide-open, judgy eyes in one moment, then switching to ingratiate herself to the latest addition to the family, Eve Hewson’s Amelia, with enough shy warmth to make you think she actually has integrity after all. But the most delicious part of her performance is the way she very gently stabs a knife into even seemingly nice interactions. “I’m so happy we could rearrange our plans for the Fourth to be here,” she says in the first episode. With a big smile and girlish shrug of her shoulders, the blade finds flesh and digs in. —J.C.
Renée Elise Goldsberry, Girls5Eva
Of the members of Girls5Eva’s titular girl group, Wickie was always the star, though of course the show is stuffed with jokes about the horrors that ensued when she tried to go solo. Over the course of two seasons on Peacock and a (not long enough) six-episode bonus on Netflix, the character who began as the second coming of Jenna Maroney grew into a work of sweetly delusional high art in her own right. Wickie may never get the comeback she believes she deserves, but the show’s writing and Renée Elise Goldsberry’s performance, which combines poise with a Lucille Ball–esque commitment to physical comedy and deliciously grandiose line readings, are both so specific, it’s easy to imagine her living on in any given pop-culture scenario: hijacking the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, campaigning to replace her dear frenemy Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Blvd., or consulting her riff rolodex to find the right glissando to apply to the news that the girls have been selected to perform on the Brat tour (the one sponsored by the German American Sausage Association of Madison, Wisconsin). —J.M.
Manny Jacinto, The Acolyte
Yes, Manny Jacinto was extremely hot as the Stranger on The Acolyte; there’s no point in trying to deny that as part of the character’s appeal. But putting aside the bangs, the baby oil, and that bathing scene, what worked so well about Jacinto’s former Jedi trainee lured to the dark side was his ability to convey bone-deep resentment and bitter disgust without much dialogue. All that emotion lived in the tilt of his head, the clench in his jaw, the tension held in those forearms as he dueled the Jedi masters who abandoned him and the peers who forgot him. The Stranger’s toothy mask was a sick look; it doesn’t compare at all, though, to the levels of vulnerability and fury Jacinto communicated when he took it off. —R.H.
Richard Kind, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA and Girls5Eva
It’s always a good year for Richard Kind, and this one saw him as the pink-eye-plagued Vince Fish in Only Murders in the Building, a judge on Evil, a guest on an episode of Night Court, and a voice actor on Mickey Mouse Funhouse — and that’s not even a complete accounting of 2024. The year was particularly good for Richard Kind as his best, most enduring, and most beloved character: Richard Kind. First, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA asked Kind to be a delighted, somewhat flabbergasted, often confused, and always supportive sidekick for John Mulaney’s bizarro short-run late-night show. He has lines; he stands behind a podium; really, he’s just there to be Richard Kind, somehow even more treasured despite being ubiquitous. He’s great at it, of course, in part because his feeling of being a little perplexed about the whole thing comes off as perfectly sincere. But it’s Girls5Eva that allowed Kind to lay out his grand theory of fame. Wearing napkins tucked into his collar and happily going to town on some craft services, he declares, “I’ve spent the past 40 years striking the perfect balance between constantly working and never getting bugged at a deli.” This Kind-as-Kind performance is exaggerated enough to fit comfortably into the wacky Girls5Eva mold, but like John Mulaney Presents, it carries the ultimate pleasure of any Kind appearance — his pleasure. He is happy to be there, and that translates into every frame. —Kathryn VanArendonk
Anna Sawai, Shōgun
Anna Sawai’s work in Shōgun is so patently excellent, and has been so broadly acclaimed, that calling it out as a best performance feels almost perfunctory. But Sawai earns every ounce of praise. As Lady Mariko translates between the feudal lords and the fish-out-of-water Anjin, she interprets the various bits of court intrigue from her unusually multifaceted perspective, while her religious beliefs allow her to become a personal embodiment of larger global tensions. It’s a role that, while essential, could easily serve as mostly functional with little inner depth. But Sawai brings a persistent awareness that Mariko is not just a woman defined by being stuck within opposing forces. She holds the center of all of Shōgun’s political scope and tonal registers. Her work makes Cosmo Jarvis’s ridiculous Blackthorne better. It plays beautifully against Hiroyuki Sanada’s careful, ambitious Toranaga. Mostly, though, her sense of moral clarity, her anger, her aesthetic taste, her ideas of justice, and her grief are the value systems that shape the viewers’ experience of the story, and we often track them just by watching Sawai’s face as she reacts. —K.VA.
Andrew Scott, Ripley
No actor owns Tom Ripley; there have been too many onscreen versions of Patricia Highsmith’s con artist and serial killer for that. No actor has played him with as much reptilian cruelty and covetous flair as Andrew Scott, either. Director Steven Zaillian and cinematographer Robert Elswit put together the most starkly beautiful show of the year, and still, Scott — with those amused eyes and barely there smile — managed to pull focus from all that chiaroscuro. If Netflix doesn’t commission more Ripley adaptations from the team that put together this playfully cold masterpiece, it will be a tragedy. —R.H.
Alia Shawkat, The Old Man
The look on Alia Shawkat’s face when her character kills a Taliban operative and accepts her identity as Afghan heiress Parwana Hamzad; the look on her face when she defeats a cadre of Russian mercenaries and takes over her late father’s business dealings around the world; the look on her face when she commands Jeff Bridges’s Dan Chase, the man who stole her from her life in Afghanistan, to defend her in her new role as the Hamzad family’s leader: Alia Shawkat can do a Paddington hard stare like no one else, and in a year of disappointing strong female characters, she was that bitch on The Old Man. —R.H.
Vince Vaughn, Bad Monkey
The role of Andrew Yancy, the disgraced, anti-Establishment detective who becomes fixated on a case of suspected murder, was not written for Vince Vaughn. The character was invented by novelist Carl Hiaasen, whose book inspired this Apple TV+ adaptation from Bill Lawrence. Yet the part lines up beautifully with Vaughn’s set of skills: Yancy’s a motormouth, a charmer, and someone who doesn’t suffer fools, and Vaughn wears all those qualities as effortlessly as he wears his flowing button-down Hawaiian shirts. The fact that the performance looks so easy doesn’t mean that it comes without effort, though. It’s infinitely harder to make Yancy’s impulsive behavior and ability to casually drop a cutting remark — “You have the most punchable face I’ve ever seen not on a golf course” — seem tossed off. A lot of actors would overdo it and try too hard. But not sweating things that are literally and metaphorically heated is essential to who Andrew Yancy is, and Vaughn is completely in tune with his frequency. —J.C.
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