Get ready for an exciting year of television! The editors of The Television series discuss top TV highlights we can expect to see on our screens in 2024. From a 1960s-themed Doctor Who to the American political thriller television series The Diplomat, these key moments from 2024 promise to deliver some iconic TV content, which will further fuel current debates explored in The Television series.
Doctor Who
In May 2024, Doctor Who (Ncuti Gatwa) will travel back to 1963 and meet The Beatles in the year of Doctor Who’s first broadcast. Dressed in appropriately spiffy Carnaby Street costume, the Doctor will appear at Abbey Road studios in London, just as The Beatles are recording their first hits. This will be an iconic moment that links Doctor Who’s sixty-year TV history with the most important British pop group of all time.
Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor (BBC 2024)
The 2024 visit to The Beatles recalls their appearance in the Doctor Who story ‘The Chase’ in 1965. In the serial, the Doctor was experimenting with his Time Space Visualiser machine, a metaphor for TV itself since it can show both immediate events in the present but also represent past and future times. Similarly, the Doctor, in his TARDIS time travel machine, can go anywhere and any-when in his adventures. The Visualiser showed “great moments” of history, such as Shakespeare’s meeting with Elizabeth I and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but the Doctor’s young companion Vicki also asked it to show The Beatles performing Ticket to Ride, which she, from the future, saw as timeless classical music. This jokey incident played with idea of TV, like pop, as entertaining yet serious, of the moment but also historically important, and self-conscious art as well as popular culture.
The Time Space Visualiser in Doctor Who, ‘The Chase’ (BBC 1965)
The Chase and the 2024 visit by the Doctor to Abbey Road are about moving in time and space, to experience exciting, important, memorable moments. Our Moments in Television books are about important moments in TV programmes, and how TV programmes can be important moments in cultural history. The argument made by the Series and by the contributors to each Moments book is that TV can have “moment” in the sense of weight or significance.
Last year we published the Epic/Everyday volume in the Moments in Television series, in which contributors expanded ‘Epic’ beyond simply meaning ‘big’ to reveal surprising links between the ambition, expansiveness and moral concerns of epic as a traditional literary form and features of modern television. For some of our authors, ‘Everyday’ referred not only to the role of TV in everyday life but also to the philosophical concerns of ‘everyday aesthetics’. It was in the context of the Epic/Everyday binary that Jonathan Bignell wrote about The Beatles in ‘The Chase’, arguing that Doctor Who meditates on what TV can be, using the format of the popular weekly adventure series.
Jonathan Bignell
Death in Paradise
2024 sees the 100th episode of the enduringly popular Death in Paradise (2011-present). Whilst scholars’ and critics’ attitudes to the show have tended to range from wholly uninterested to sniffily dismissive, audiences both in the UK and abroad continue to embrace this gentle, warm-hearted detective series, set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie.
100th episode of Death in Paradise
Now in its thirteenth series, Death in Paradise (DinP) remains a resolutely old-fashioned kind of TV programme. It is generic, episodic and formulaic: with the exception of occasional ‘specials’, each episode presents one murder case (though there may be more than one victim) which the core team of police officers tackle and resolve. Three key characters have been present since the very first episode: Commissioner Selywn Paterson (Don Warrington); Catherine Bordey (Élizabeth Bourgine), the owner of a local beach-front bar in which the team routinely gather to socialise; and Harry the lizard. The rest of the cast, including the protagonist British detective (currently DI Neville Parker, played by Ralf Little), has changed several times over the years, but deft handling by the creators has sustained a broadly well-balanced, comfortable ensemble at the centre of the show. And exotic though Saint Marie might be, the repetition of specific, quotidian places on the island – including the police station, Catherine’s bar and the DI’s beach shack – contribute further to the programme’s air of cosy familiarity and rustic charm.
The shack, Death in Paradise
DinP recognises the pleasures to be found in simplicity and the everyday, two of the themes we explore in the Moments in television books. In Simplicity/Complexity, Sarah Cardwell argues particularly for the value of simplicity in TV; in Epic/Everyday, we address the importance of the everyday, and everyday aesthetics, to television. The Introduction to Epic/Everyday also proffers an alternative view of the kind of episodic TV of which DinP is such a clear-cut example: the programme could just as well be considered in as an instance of classic epic structure, which is characterised by temporal prolongation that relies heavily upon the episodic, digressive, repetitive, generic and formulaic.
How, then, does DinP observe the occasion of its rather special hundredth episode? In keeping with its established character, it opts for understated celebration, taking the opportunity to look back fondly, acknowledge its longevity and reward the loyal fan. There is no obvious departure from the series’ customary format. The episode employs frugally some stylistic devices used previously in ‘special’ episodes and now familiar to regular viewers: cuts to black between brief, silent shots, which indicate moments that are atypically shocking or momentous. Here, they are employed to mark the attempted murder of Selwyn Paterson.
Commissioner Selywn Paterson, Death in Paradise
Placing the life of the longstanding Commissioner in jeopardy enables a retrospective and reflective mood. The reason for the attack on Paterson is revealed to lie in his past, and we see him in flashback, as a very young man, at the moment in which he becomes a police officer on Saint Marie; in a sense, then, the story is both about Paterson and the very police force on which DinP centres. As the investigation proceeds, we are offered momentary reminders of past members of the Saint Marie team (including Richard Poole, Camille Bordey and Florence Cassell) – though Harry is disappointingly AWOL. But the hundredth episode is not only concerned with the past; it constitutes a pivotal moment in which past strands are wrapped with future ones, for it opens Series 13, which sees the welcome return of at least two central characters from previous eras: police officers Dwayne Myers (Danny John-Jules) and DS Florence Cassell (Joséphine Jobert).
Perhaps one reason that Death in Paradise has achieved more than a hundred episodes in today’s competitive TV landscape is that it has the confidence not to veer too far from its beginnings. Always broadcast in the UK winter, offering a reliable escape into a warm, cosy and reassuring world, it has become a TV tradition. Even in a world of TV-on-demand, each episode is made available online (iPlayer) weekly, only from the day of its broadcast, and so to watch each one we must wait until the right moment.
Harry the lizard, Death in Paradise
Sarah Cardwell
The Diplomat
As a series first released on Netflix nearly one year ago, The Diplomat (2023-to present) might seem like an odd choice for a post on television moments to watch out for in 2024. However, watching the first series 11 months after its initial release offers perhaps an example of how TV watching for some is unmoored from its moment – streaming presents the ability to be out-of-sync with a schedule or even conversations about television that occur when they air / are released.
The Diplomat is very much invested in its contemporary moment, with a narrative that engages with our political present (or at least the political present of spring 2023, with references to war in Ukraine and potential tensions between UK/US and Russia and Iran) when Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), a career diplomat on her way to a post in Afghanistan, is appointed as the US Ambassador to the UK. Watching it at a later point in some ways highlights just how of its time it is, while serving as a reminder of the complex histories of modern conflicts – however present they are, they form part of a longer history, one which the series is continually reminding us is connected to past events and parallel situations in other parts of the world.
This contemporariness then is part of the series’ larger orientation towards complexity, a central concern of the Moments in Television volume, Complexity/Simplicity. This complexity is certainly part of its narrative concerns and structure, which intertwine the professional and personal, global and local, as the characters endeavour to deal with political ramifications of an event which has the potential to ignite war with first Iran and then Russia, while also navigating romantic unions, both old and new. In this sense, the narrative and the performances which carry it highlight the challenge and difficulties of diplomacy, and its importance in managing political agendas which come with personal attitudes and egos. As Sarah Cardwell’s introduction to Complexity/Simplicity notes, this kind of narrative depth, intensity and scope very much aligns with previous television scholarship that celebrates ‘complex TV’, while the Moments in Television volume seeks to move beyond what can be seen as a narrow definition to think beyond narrative. For The Diplomat, we can look to complexity as a central feature of the series’ tone, which manages to combine the seriousness of world events and dealing with the people who shape them with a lightness which perhaps speaks acutely to strategies of coping with difficult decisions (and people).
Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and foreign secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) weigh up the best form of meeting for the President and Prime Minister.
The series’ affective register propels action and emotion in ways that connect it to another binary interrogated by the Moments in Television series, Epic/Everyday. A repeated moment in The Diplomat concerns Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) ensuring his wife, Kate, eats some breakfast. This scene, repeatedly observed by Kate’s deputy chief of mission, Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), who is first confused by Hal’s eating habits and then witness to Hal’s understanding of and care for his wife, signals Hal’s ability to ‘play wife’ to her posting. The possibility that Hal can put aside his own career ambitions – as former US Ambassador to Lebanon – and support Kate is a key tension throughout, and one which continually threatens to end their marriage. This moment, or series of moments, offers an expression of the everyday – the need for breakfast and competing demands of work – which has potentially epic ramifications for the personal lives of the protagonists. The ending of series one answers this mundane breakfast scene in a much more spectacular moment – the season cliffhanger – which nonetheless speaks to this domestic/professional tension between the couple.
Hal (Rufus Sewell) waits for Kate to finish his breakfast
The co-existence of epic and everyday in the balance between a marriage and professional life which involves the high stakes of world events is explored by Courtney Hopf and Liam Creighton in their chapter on The Americans (FX, 2013-18) (also starring Keri Russell). The Americans is also subject of a chapter by Lucy Fife Donaldson in the Moments volume Substance/Style, which argues for interconnectedness of the binary – style (material environment as well as outer behaviour) as substance (politics and meaning) – through attention to performance and design. The Diplomat offers a further opportunity to consider Keri Russell’s skill as a performer, and the way the design of the series, especially choices around her costume, hair and make-up situate her discomfort and unpreparedness for the public-facing aspects of her role. In contrast to the polish and armoured slickness of Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans, Russell as Kate Wyler resists being styled and contained by her appearance.
Kate reluctantly submits to a photo-shoot for Vogue
A new series of The Diplomat is coming this year, though no date has yet been announced.
Lucy Fife Donaldson
