The 5 Best PBS Shows of 2024

We've reached the halfway mark of the third decade of the 21st century, and while things are not anything like people said the future would be, there have been bright spots. One of those bright spots is the rise of prestige TV, a subset of high-end programming that has drawn actors who were once feature films only to the small screen, where they perform some of the best work to be found in recent times. As the streaming wars wind down, those who can afford to make such shows have dwindled, but PBS, despite its struggles, PBS remains a bastion of the genre.

Every year, we run down the creme-de-la-creme of PBS' offerings, many (though not all) arriving via Masterpiece on Sundays at 9 p.m. However, we should note that for 2024, this list must come with an asterisk, as the best show to run under the Masterpiece banner was a nin-year-old rerun; the spectacular Wolf Hall, which has not lost a single step over the decade, proof that the series may be one of the few shows that can indeed be seen as "timeless." 

That being said, Masterpiece was also responsible for bringing one of the two worst British shows of the year, Alice & Jack, a leftover vestige of the prestige TV era's worst self-indulgent excesses. So perhaps it is not the worst thing that these big-budget, high-end, thought-provoking shows will be more limited in who makes them. Hopefully, Masterpiece will avoid such pitfalls in the future.

Despite being delayed six months in arrival, The Marlow Murder Club was worth the wait. The mystery series doesn't exactly break new ground in its three female friends deciding to solve mysteries because they are bored. However, the four-episode series gave viewers a lovely debut, full of the character-driven emotional connection that makes a cozy crime show sing. 

The lead trio of Judith (Samantha Bond), Becks (Cara Horgan), and Suzie (Jo Martin) have fantastic chemistry and are electric to watch when they put their heads together. Fans can't wait for the show's second season (greenlit long before the show finally aired in October 2024) to have them team up with DS Tanika Malik (Natalie Dew) for a new case in 2025.

The Marlow Murder Club Season 1 is streaming on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. Season 2 is expected to arrive in late 2025 or early 2026.

Seaside Hotel (Badehotellet) was the first significant hit for PBS Passport when it first made a deal with Walter Presents to supply programming for the nascent streaming service in 2019. Five years later, the Danish series concludes with its tenth and final season, and unlike some shows that ran for a decade, it stuck the landing in Season 10 and made it look easy. 

Despite having a soap opera's worth of storylines to wrap up, the series gave everyone a conclusion that felt correct for their characters and, more importantly, earned. It also took a massive risk, time jumping past the conclusion of World War II, allowing viewers to see how the post-war world would shape up and where our characters would be now that peace was restored and it was time to rebuild. Most importantly, for ten seasons, this show made Americans care about a bed and breakfast on the coast of Europe, something that few series could manage and made them glad they took the journey.

All ten seasons of Seaside Hotel are streaming on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.

A lot could have been awkward about Funny Woman, the adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling novel Funny Girl, starting with the most obvious: the discordant name change. (Funny Girl was already kind of taken as a show name.) With a lesser cast, the tale of a woman trying to break into the boy's comedy club at the BBC in the early 1960s could have felt didactic or stereotypical, especially since the show's main character, Barabra (Gemma Arterton), goes through so many of the standard cliches from dating her co-star to falling in love with her boss.

But Arterton's performance buoyed the show to creative heights simply by infusing her character with believability and a convincing set of mores that led her to make those choices. She reminded us that these were the stereotypical choices women made at the time for a reason. It also helped that she was surrounded by an A-list cast that elevated the material at every turn to Arterton's level, making Season 2's return for 2025 one of the more anticipated of the year.

Funny Woman Season 1 is streaming on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. Season 2 will debut on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, PBS Passport, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Sunday, February 2, 2025. (As always, check your local listings.)

A last-minute addition to the PBS lineup after it became ITV's biggest hit since Downton Abbey in January 2024, Mr. Bates vs the Post Office's retelling of one of the British government's recent ugly chapters was riveting. Surely, someone in the bureaucracy would be willing to admit the machines they invested in were faulty. They wouldn't really let the post office jail people for crimes they never committed and pay back money that was never missing, ruining hundreds of lives and affecting thousands of families, would they?

A stellar cast led by Toby Jones as the titular Alan Bates and Monica Dolan as a fellow sub-post master whose life was nearly ruined by a bunch of stiffnecked jerks who couldn't admit they made a mistake made viewers feel every inch of this miscarriage of justice. It was also a warning: it might not have been our government this time, but that doesn't mean it won't be next.

All episodes of Mr Bates vs the Post Office are streaming on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.

Two years ago, at the end of 2022, one show on PBS stood head and shoulders above every other debut that year: Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders. This meta-meditation on the popularity of mystery series, housed within the clever conceit of a 1950s-set period mystery series within a larger contemporary-set mystery series, was like no other cozy crime show. 

Starring Lesley Manville as editor Susan Ryleand, the story follows her attempt to solve the mystery of who murdered her best-selling author by looking for clues laid within his final novel, with real-life characters appearing as thinly veiled versions of themselves within the story, allowing the show to do a delightful amount of double-casting within its whodunit structure. The follow-up, Moonflower Murders, proved the series was no fluke, with one of the most startling reveals in the show's final episode, making it not only the best mystery series of 2024 but the best British show to air on PBS in 2024. 

Magpie Murders and Moonfloower Murders are streaming with all episodes on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. Horowitz's third and final installment, Marble Hall Murders, will be released as a novel in the spring of 2025; Masterpiece is expected to greenlight it to be adapted for television once the book is out.