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Box of delights
What does 2024’s TV say about us, asks RT columnist Caroline Frost
BBC
- Caroline Frost
Major events like elections, ongoing wars and conflict around the globe have dominated the news in the past 12 months, but a snapshot of television’s biggest moments of the year reveals that, for the most part, we would sooner leave the chaos of the outside world unchecked. Instead we chose to lean into our small screens for familiarity, comfort and an escape to seemingly simpler times.
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Aside from the established stalwarts – Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, The Repair Shop, The Great British Bake Off et al – one new show became the go-to for sofa-and-slippers fare. When a diffident David Mitchell walked almost backwards onto screen as John “Ludwig” Taylor, the crossword-compiling beta male with a penchant for solving crime and restoring social order – at least in Cambridge – the biggest compliment I could pay him was that it seemed as though he had always been there.
Baby Reindeer. Netflix
If Ludwig felt like all previous small-screen detectives mixed together in a Petri dish, not everything made for familiar or reassuring viewing.
Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer captivated with its embrace of complication in the true-ish tale of a man escaping but also enabling his pursuer. Such authenticity inevitably came with a human price: Emmy awards now fill its real-life protagonist’s mantelpiece, but the lawsuits remain pending.
The finance drama Industry got even better, its creators following the adage “write of what you know”, keeping us invested in the fates if not fortunes of the troubled one-percenters of investment banking.
And talking of eliciting surprising sympathy, Lennie James’s performance as Barry in Mr Loverman moved us far beyond the tut-tut clichés of a middle-aged man cheating on his wife and into a community of conflicting loyalties with no villains.
On the whole, though, it seemed we favoured revisiting over revolution for our TV pleasures. Gary Oldman continued to inspire us with his refusal to meet influencer-style standards as Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses; Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm went out with a bang, not a whimper; a probably underpaid BBC producer had a spark of inspiration and booked comedian Chris McCausland to dazzle in an otherwise sleepy Strictly Come Dancing.
Not entirely new writers were the beneficiaries of deep-pocketed drama commissioners, with classy adaptations of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley providing big hits for Sky Atlantic and Netflix respectively. Disney+, meanwhile, covered Minnie’s eyes and gave us naked tennis and more courtesy of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Rivals, whose 1980s setting brought us anachronisms both good (the music, the make-up) and very poor (the men).
Mr Bates vs the Post Office. ITV
Does all this familiar fare mean that we need the comfort of what we know, or is it because it’s fed to us by unimaginative channel heads? Does television hold up a reflective mirror to society or lead the way with a light?
Which leads us to series two of Wolf Hall, finishing a year that began with Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Both dramas were reminders of what can happen when power goes unchecked – but also that, amid all the escapism, great television can come from those occasions when we let a little reality slip onto our screens…
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Happy Christmas, and roll on 2025!
Authors
Caroline Frost
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