The year of 2024 was a busy one for us at Broad Street Hockey. Keeping up with this damn Philadelphia Flyers team is hard work enough. So when we have actual time to not watch hockey and enjoy what we’re seeing on our screens, what do we pick?
Since it’s the end of the year, let’s all gather around and talk about a couple things that we really enjoyed watching this year, instead of the Flyers.
Jason M.: Baby Reindeer. The short but head-scratching series based on some actual events that Richard Gadd endured and survived was well worth the watch. It’s just the type of show you can’t get out of your head for a while because it’s so bizarre and unnerving. One thing the series showed is that some people still don’t have or don’t use autocorrect on their phones.
Steve: X-Men ‘97. The revival of a Saturday morning cartoon probably should not have been a big deal. Bringing the early 90s X-Men cartoon back seemed like an easy cash cow for Disney and a way to get people excited about Marvel’s merry mutants before they become the focus of the MCU in a few years. However, X-Men ‘97 was excellent.
Controversial showrunner Beau DeMayo brought a personal touch and an extensive knowledge of X-Men history with him to this series. The season consolidated and remixed some of the greatest storylines in X-Men history and even elevated some of the cruddier ones (I’m looking at you, Bastion). X-Men ‘97 truly embraced the persecuted minority metaphor that has connected the franchise with fans since it was reworked in 1975. People tried to give it the old “X-Men has gone woke!” nonsense, but you can’t claim something has “gone woke” when it has always been woke. X-Men, at its best. Is about finding family in those like you and fighting against the forces that don’t want you to exist simply because you’re different. X-Men ‘97 embraced that and delivered a show that was my highlight of the year.
Thomas: Survivor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m roughly a couple decades behind on watching the top competition reality show and the program that basically laid the foundation of a whole lot of existing shows today, but it just rocks so much that I couldn’t not talk about it. I spent a large part of my year catching up on old seasons that are available online after first being introduced to Survivor in 2023; and, well, turns out it’s good.
This year featured two very good seasons that had almost everything you wanted out of a season of Survivor. I won’t go too much into it for spoilers, but it’s telling that I spent more hours watching this show than watching any movie this year.
Maddie: The Beast. I’m not much of a tv guy, so I’m gonna pivot us into the realm of movies for a bit here. I saw a lot of great movies this year, and that was fun, but far and away the best was French director Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. Technically a 2023 release, it didn’t make it to the theater near me until last spring, and it’s one that I had to see twice – I was so blown away by it after the first viewing that I spent a week thinking about it and had to make time to go catch it again on the last day of its run.
It’s a perfect package for me – the visuals are stunning, the leads (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) are excellent, the blend of sci-fi, romance, and classic horror elements make for such an interesting tone, and the way it grapples with big questions – how humanity will coexist with AI as it progresses, and how we navigate holding on to our emotions and sentimentality in a society at large which increasingly sees those are frivolous – is incredibly timely, but done in a way that doesn’t feel didactic. All in all, this film is a real hidden gem, and one that’s stuck with me for a while.
Steph: Ghosts. Picture this, you inherit a mansion from a long lost family member. You’re a twenty something and decide to embrace the challenge and move to the country to start your own B&B in said mansion. Then you have an accident, you almost die. And when you come back home, your house is full of people you have never seen before. They look just like everyone else, they interact with you like everyone else, except they are dressed out of the pages of history. Revolutionary War. The Gilded Age. Vikings. You ask your husband what the hell is going on and he doesn’t see the people that are standing in front of you. Eventually, you realize the people you’re seeing are ghosts of people who have died on the property and boy are they chatty.
This is my new favorite show, and it’s on CBS of all places. Ghosts is based on a UK show of the same name – I recommend them both, even though there are a lot of recreated episodes in the US version. The creepy factor is zero, these are just normal people living their normal eternal afterlives learning about things like Alexa, television, and cars. Hijinks ensue. It’s a super fun, super light show that has a fresh perspective on what happens when we die. The dynamic between the wife who can see the 15+ ghosts on the property and also anywhere else she goes and the husband who cannot see them but hears one half of all conversations is absolutely hilarious. The husband starts to keep notes on ghost lore; they can walk through walls but also sit on furniture, they are limited to the property on which they die and carry what was on them when they died, they call ascending “getting sucked off” as a joke from one of the more recently passed ghosts. Oh, and when someone gets sent to hell, they call it “going down on them”. The UK version has concluded with 5 seasons, the US version is in the middle of season 4. Some ghosts have “ghost powers” like being able to touch solid objects, humming so the living can hear, and making people high or horny depending on who you walk through. It’s a great show and I want everyone to watch.
Matt: Like Maddie, my television diet is very skimpy. This year it was mostly Taskmaster (UK), an absolutely delightful hybrid of comedy talk show and game show that involves very funny people being told things like “make the biggest splash, you have 20 minutes.” Movie-wise my favorite thing that came out in 2024 that I’ve seen so far is probably Anora. I’ve been in the bag for Sean Baker for a while and it’s so satisfying to see him level up into the mainstream with this After Hours-Parasite-Cinderella cocktail. I also thought we had some very good big blockbuster follow-ups from talented auteurs on screens this year with George Miller’s Furiosa and Denis Villenueve’s Dune: Part Two; some great scumbum curios like Connor O’Malley’s Rap World, Adam Rehmeier’s Snack Shack, and Ethan Coen’s solo debut Drive-Away Dolls; and some great films from outside the US like Evil Does Not Exist (directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi), Maddie’s incredibly correct pick The Beast (Bertrand Bonello), Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude), Laapataa Ladies (Kiran Rao), and Look Back (Kiyotaka Oshiyama). I also loved Hit Man by probably my favorite living director Richard Linklater and was shocked by my love for Juror #2. Still looking forward to Nickel Boys, The Brutalist, and Hard Truths.
The best thing I watched for the first time in 2024, though, was Dogfight—Nancy’s Savoca’s 1991 sophomore effort starring River Phoenix as a teenage soldier on shore leave in 1963 who participates in a bring-the-ugliest-girl-to-the-party party and ends up bringing the homely, folk-singing, anti-war Lili Taylor. The movie is tender, bittersweet, sincere, caustic, and has stuck with me for months.
