For me, the best streaming TV series in 2024 were:
1. Netflix: The Playlist: A brilliant look at the invention of streaming told through the story of how Spotify came to be. A tour de force exposition, where each segment tells the story from a different perspective (the co-founders of the Spotify, the technical geeks who had to hack through the latency issues in TCP/IP protocol that runs the web, the record industry that had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the streaming age ("what, you want us to give away our music for free?"), and finally the artists themselves who were terrified of being sidelined.
2. Netflix: The Queen's Gambit: the best TV series about chess ever made, why it is such an addictive game, and why it was for many years the central challenge problem of AI till it was solved by a series of technical breakthroughs that began in the late 1950s by Claude Shannon, the pioneer of information theory without whose work digital music and the Internet would not exist, followed by research at Carnegie Mellon, where I was privileged to spend a few years as a grad student while the founders of AI were still alive, and finally at IBM Research, where Deep Blue finally beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. The Netflix series is about a young woman who is a chess prodigy and overcomes a tough background in foster homes to rise to the top of the chess world.
3. Apple TV: Slow Horses: Absolutely brilliant adaptation of a Mi5/6 British spy story series by novelist Mick Herron, who nails it in terms of writing a spy series that combines both spoof, wit, and deadly intrigue. Gary Oldman is his usual brilliant self as Jonathan Lamb who manages the Slow Horses outfit of misfits, outcasts and screwups from the regular MI5/6 organization who got thrown out for doing something really bad. His whole management philosophy should become the basis for how companies organize themselves -- he tells his staff at every turn that they suck, they're terrible, and they're worse than useless, but they love him all the more for it. Absolutely riveting through all its seasons.
4.Apple TV: Ted Lasso: I thought this was genuinely both funny and inspiring about an American football coach who gets a job managing one of the British soccer teams, and it combines this weird disconnect between the US and the UK -- we speak the same language, but the phraseology is so different that they might as well be different languages. But as the seasons wore on, I thought the series started to get a bit stale, and I haven't finished watching it yet.
5. MAX: House of the Dragon: the prequel to GOT. Of course, there can only ever be one GOT, which will probably go down in TV history as the greatest series ever made, except the Season 8 ending disappointed those who wanted the usual happy ending. But HOD is good in its own way, and while it's far more moody and dark --all the scenes are shot in a twilight sort of cinematography -- it is worth seeing.
I confess to not having watched Yellowstone, since I don't think much of Kevin Costner's acting abilities, and his penchant for making long dreary Westerns (remember his Dances with Wolves?). I'm also a bit too weary of this genre, frankly, since I probably ended up seeing too many Westerns as a kid (e.g., The Good, Bad, and Ugly, and of course the remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Clint Eastwood's various versions etc.).
