The 2024 Very Specific TV Awards

The end of the year is a time for reflection, a chance to look back on your high and lows of the previous 12 months and assess everything anew. To look at your growth and strengths and weaknesses and how they all played out. To do some self-assessment, honestly, and think of ways to use this knowledge to improve going forward.

It is also a time for lists. Lots of lists. Bests, worsts, all of it. That’s what we’re all doing right now.  Reflecting and making lists. Mostly just making lists, actually. Reflection is hard. Much harder than, say, emptying out your folder of screenshots from 2024 to hand out a slew of incredibly specific awards to the people and themes and tiny little moments that make watching television so much fun. Maybe I’ll reflect next year. For now, it is my great pleasure to present this year’s Very Specific TV Awards.

Best Hop: Cristin Milioti in The Penguin

You can’t make a list of best performances of 2024 without including Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone on The Penguin. I mean, you can, I guess, if you want to, just like people on the show can choose to cross and/or underestimate her. But then you’d run the risk of her gassing your house and strutting around in a gas mask and party dress to survey the damage she’s done. She might even do a little hop like the one in that GIF up there, somehow joyful and diabolical and upsetting and fascinating all rolled into one. But that’s why you would never leave her off your list. Because you’re scared, sure, but mostly because it was just that good.

Best Dad Joke: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Donald Glover is good at making television. Maya Erskine is a star. These are the primary takeaways from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Amazon Prime series that took the Pitt-Jolie movie and turned it on its head by zeroing in on the smaller issues with being undercover as a married couple. The first dates, the bathroom-sharing, the real feelings that can develop over time, all of it. The show also included this very stupid joke that I, a lifelong Pennsylvania resident, have had in my head ever since.

A success on a number of levels, really.

Best Broken Penis: Doctor Odyssey

Guess how long it took for Doctor Odyssey, the new Ryan Murphy network television series about a handsome cruise-ship doctor played by Joshua Jackson, to feature an emergency involving a passenger’s broken penis. Did you guess “15 minutes into the series premiere”? Because if you did, you were right.

In hindsight, I’m surprised it took that long, just knowing what we know now about this chaotic little program. This wasn’t even the only penis-related injury in the first chunk of episodes. We could have dozens if the show makes it through three seasons.

Best Use of Harrison Ford: Shrinking

Shrinking, currently in its second season on Apple TV+, has been squeezing every drop of humor it can out of making Harrison Ford say silly things pretty much from the start. This is not a complaint. Why wouldn’t you, you know? You’ve got freaking Harrison Ford right there ready and willing to say anything you put on the page in front of him. Why not do an extended riff on him incorrectly using the term “raw dog”? Why not have him say the collection of words up there in that screencap? The only limits here are the furthest reaches of your imagination.

I hope they get him to recite the entire first verse of “Shoop,” by Salt N Pepa, before the show wraps up. Maybe at karaoke. Don’t act like you’re not picturing it in your head right now.

Best Haunting Cover of “Toxic”: Fargo

What we have here:

Jon Hamm as a menacing and evil sheriff in the latest season of Fargo …

… marching with anger and purpose in his eyes to go do something menacing and evil …

… as what quickly becomes apparent is a haunting cover of “Toxic,” by Britney Spears, plays in the background.

I smiled so damn wide when I realized what was happening. I’m smiling again now. I’ll probably keep smiling every time I think about it.

Best Second Life As a Meme: Shōgun

BLACKTHORNE: A meme?! A blasted … meme??? What is this godforsaken tomfoolery? We did a real show! A good one, with swords and cannons and cultural differences! It was a damn epic! A … triumph of television! And you choose to honor us with … a meme? This is treachery, that’s what this is. I won’t stand for it. Get me my ship! We’ll blast you all straight to hell to meet the devil himself!

LADY MARIKO: The anjin appreciated your jokes.

Best Toothpick Cameo: What We Do in the Shadows

Was I sad about What We Do in the Shadows coming to an end? Yes.

Will I miss this delightfully silly little show about horny vampires bumbling around Staten Island? Of course.

Did I bark and clap like a seal when they briefly brought back Jackie Daytona and his toothpick in the series finale? I think you know I did.

Best Secret Cameo: A Man on the Inside

Okay, see that? See the sweater of the young woman in the classroom Ted Danson’s character is lecturing to in the final moments of the first season of the new Michael Schur Netflix series A Man on the Inside? Does it look familiar to you? Maybe a little? Maybe like something another character wore in another finale of another show that starred Ted Danson and was produced by Michael Schur?

Hmm.

I think you can tell I’m headed somewhere here. And the place I’m headed is … good. I’m headed to The Good Place. As we know thanks to this Instagram post by D’Arcy Carden — who also pops up in the scene — that was actually Kristen Bell wearing the exact sweater she wore in the finale of the NBC sitcom a few years back. I’m glad everyone is having fun here.

Best Fart-Based Communication: Slow Horses

It’s hard to overstate how nice it is to have a legitimately great spy show like this, one full of twists and quips and subterfuge at every turn, where the main character — Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman at his rumpled best — communicates mostly through flatulence. “Mostly” might be a bit of an overstatement. He does use words. Sometimes. When he has to.

Best Use of Richard Kind: Everybody’s in L.A.

God bless John Mulaney for putting together this little anarchic pop-up carnival of a talk show and letting Richard Kind run amok as his announcer. I feel like this was the year we truly started to appreciate what a treasure that man is. It took us too long, sure, but the important thing is that we’re doing it now. Good for all of us. But especially good for Richard Kind.

Best Unrelenting Earworm: “Sushi Glory Hole”

Hear us out. 

Hear us out. 

Hear us out. 

Where you going?

Hear us out. 

Repeat continuously in your head from now until the sun swallows the Earth whole.

Best Angela Bassett: Angela Bassett

Do you … do you realize what happened in 2024? Do you realize that, through a confluence of events, we had two separate three-part 9-1-1 season premieres in one calendar year? Back in March, at the beginning of season seven, Angela Bassett thwarted a crew of heavily armed pirates who stormed her honeymoon cruise as the boat was headed toward a hurricane. Then, just six months later, the eighth season debuted and Angela Bassett landed a full-size airplane on the freeway after the pilot had been sucked through the roof due to a series of events that started with escaped bees.

Do you see now? Angela Bassett, in 2024 alone, was responsible for acts of heroism in the skies and on the open seas. I hope season nine opens with her going to the moon. I don’t really see how it can’t.

Best Weasel: Alex Moffat As Evan Shook on Bad Monkey

It’s hard to tear this award out of the clutches of Freddie Fox, but Alex Moffat managed to do it as developer and smug prick Evan Shook on Bad Monkey, a fun little summer series that Apple rolled out this year. It’s not an easy thing to do, either, being a weasel like this. You have to commit. You have to do it knowing the audience will hate you and groan every time your face appears onscreen. It’s not a glamorous gig but it is an important one, and a useful one when done well.

I wanted to hit this character with a shovel. So mission accomplished.

Best Brief Return by an All-Time Great: Martin Short As Jiminy Glick

Martin Short filled in for Jimmy Kimmel in a limited engagement this year and, in doing so, got to bring back Jiminy Glick, one of the greatest comedic characters ever invented. Watch this clip with Bill Hader. Then go to YouTube and watch a dozen more clips of Jiminy Glick interviewing celebrities. Then send them all to your friends. Then maybe watch them again. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

It is my sincere and long-standing position that we should let Jiminy Glick host the Oscars red carpet preshow, and nothing we saw this year did anything to dissuade me.