We’re coming to the end of another year, which for those of us who cover all things streaming means one thing — the annual “Best of” lists are about to start proliferating, ranking everything from the best TV shows and movies of the year to the biggest Netflix releases and much more.
Along those lines, IMDb is out with a ranking that measures something slightly different: Not the best TV shows of 2024, but rather the biggest. The site gets 250 million visitors each month, and it’s compiled a ranking of the 10 most popular shows of the year based on which titles all those monthly visitors engage with the most on the site. A quarter of a billion monthly visits is quite a big sample size, a fact you might want to keep in mind as you peruse the list below. Also, I must re-stress: We’re talking about the most popular here, not the best:
- True Detective
- The Boys
- The Penguin
- Fallout
- House of the Dragon
- Shogun
- Bridgerton
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
- The Gentlemen
- 3 Body Problem
I don’t know about you, but the mere presence of several of those titles elicits groans and eye rolls. I have no idea, for example, how True Detective was somehow able to rank as the most popular of all of 2024’s TV shows, and it’s likewise baffling to me how some of the titles above (The Penguin and Shogun, for a start) aren’t ranked higher. Likewise, if we’re talking strictly about popularity — hello, not a single Taylor Sheridan show?
Myself, I’m still thinking through the long list of TV shows I enjoyed the most over the course of 2024. Many of the titles on IMDb’s list above will no doubt end up on my own personal list of this year’s best shows, as will other standouts like FX’s The Bear and Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And who knows, there’s still time for a streamer like Netflix to surprise us with what’s left of the month of December. We shall see.