Monthly Archives: Jan 2025

2024 End of Year List 2: TV series

Posted on 3 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

The Emerging Artist and I watch far too much television. Fortunately, a lot of it is very good. We’ve learned the art of temporarily subscribing to a streaming service to watch a particular show, but we haven’t quite learned not to be seduced into staying subscribed.

We whittled our list down to twenty (20!) shows. Here they are, broken into more or less arbitrary categories:

Documentary series

Crime

  • The Bay, Seasons 1 and 2 (Daragh Carville & Richard Clark 2019, 2021, on BritBox)
  • Bad Monkey (Bill Lawrence 2024, from a Karl Hiaasen novel, on Apple TV+:)
  • Blue Lights, Season 2 (Declan Lawn & Adam Patterson 2023, on SBS On Demand)

Having babies

Other comedy

Drama

  • The Bear, Seasons 1–3 (Cannah Bos & Paul Thureen 2022–2024, on Disney+)
  • Bad Sisters, Season 2 (Brett Baer, Dave Finkel & Sharon Horgan 2024, on Apple TV+)
  • Plum (Brendan Cowell 2024, on ABC iView)
  • Boy Swallows Universe (adapted for TV by John Collee 2024, on Netflix)
  • Davos 1917 (Thomas Hess, Adrian Illien & Michael Sauter 2020, on SBS On Demand)

Next, a much shorter list: Theatre

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2024 End of Year List 1: Movies

Posted on 2 Jan 2025 | 6 comments

The Emerging Artist and I are drawing up our Best of 2023 lists. Spreading the lists over two or three posts seemed to work well last year, so here goes again

Movies

We saw about 60 movies, including streaming and TV. Here are the ones we both put at the top of our viewing year, excluding old movies we’ve rewatched.

The image captions are linked to either an IMDB page or a review by my favourite movie critic, Mark Kermode.

Three documentaries, all seen at the Sydney Film Festival. One had audience members variously in tears and yelling at each other, another sent us on a pilgrimage to the Bundeena art trail, and the third shed wonderful light on the workings of a rock band:

Two children’s movies, or at least movies seen in the company of small children:

Five features that we agreed on:

And then, three films that I loved that I saw by muyself:

So then fairness required that The EA got to name three more as well. She chose these:

And we didn’t even get to mention The Teacher Who Promised teh Sea or The Seed of the Sacred Fig or … we saw so many wonderful movies in 2024.

We did see a couple of stinkers, but it would serve no purpose to name the one we both chose unhesitatingly. We saw it at the Sydney Film Festival and it will never have a general release.

Coming soon, our favourite TV series of the year.

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