The best TV episodes of the year

A list of the best TV episodes of the year includes many less-than-famous titles. But greatness can pop up anywhere. Enjoy this list.

Episode 4 “Baby Reindeer” Created by and starring Richard Gadd and based on his life, “Baby Reindeer” knocked me out this year with its gnarled and uncompromising depictions of stalking, sexual assault, shame and ambition. Episode 4 is among the more disturbing hours of TV I’ve ever seen. Gadd’s character finds himself being groomed, drugged, raped and manipulated by a man he revered. (Streaming on Netflix.) — Margaret Lyons

Season 3, Episode 6 “The Bear” This season of “The Bear” was a meal better gazed upon than eaten, dazzling on the screen but torpid in its story. But this episode, titled “Napkins,” took us back, both in narrative time and to the energy and go-for-broke emotion of the earlier seasons. It follows Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) on a humiliating job hunt. (Streaming on Hulu.) — James Poniewozik

Season 1, Episode 5 “Blue Lights” This Northern Irish series is the best new police procedural to come around in a while. One young cop continually turns down assignments, and we quickly see that she is both entitled and a coward. In this taut episode, “The Q Word,” she found herself in the field and was forced to make a choice, in a moment that was truly shattering. (Streaming on BritBox.) — Mike Hale

Season 15, Episode 4 “Bob’s Burgers” I put an episode of “Bob’s Burgers” on this list every year. In “For Whom the Doll Toes,” the youngest Belcher sister, Louise, mounted a murder mystery using dolls as a way of atoning for a wrong done to her brother. The episode embodied the show’s sweetness and rue. (Streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.) — MH

Episode 2 “Chimp Crazy” Over its four episodes, this documentary series covers the bizarre saga of a chimp called Tonka, who was in a bunch of movies before winding up in the custody of Tonia Haddix, a chimp enthusiast and participant in the exotic animal trade. The show weaves together Tonka’s story with the stories of other chimps raised by humans who eventually, often fatally, attack their owners — the most infamous of which, perhaps, is that of a Connecticut chimp named Travis, told in an episode titled “Gone Ape.” (Streaming on Max.) — Margaret Lyons

Season 1, Episode 7 “Constellation” With “Alice in Wonderland” as its spirit guide, the episode “Through the Looking Glass“ combined a puzzle-piece science-fiction mystery and a dark-woods fairy tale in a story that got at the fantastical nature of modern science. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) — MH

Season 1, Episode 10 “The Curse” If you tell me you saw this coming, I will not believe you. One of the most fruitfully perplexing experiments of 2023 ended, early in 2024, with the episode “Green Queen,” a literal upending that sent Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder), one half of a husband-and-wife reality-TV home-design team, hurtling to his death in space as his personal field of gravity was reversed. The conclusion was haunting and unforgettable in a way that too little TV was this year. (Streaming on Paramount+.) — JP

Episode 5 “Expats” Extra-long episodes of dreary dramas often are a weepy slog, but the episode “Central,” tipping the scales at an hour and 40 minutes, is gorgeous and knotty, filled to the brim. The miniseries, created and directed by Lulu Wang and based on the book “The Expatriates” by Janice Y.K. Lee, is set in Hong Kong and follows the fallout from a little boy’s disappearance. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.) — ML

Season 1, Episode 1 “The Lesson” Scenes of students and teachers sparring with one another across gaps of age, race, gender, authority and wokeness are a staple of contemporary TV. The opening episode of this Israeli series was built around a particularly tense and heartbreaking example, as an argument over an assignment turned into a harsh exchange about the rights — to space, to services, to existence — of Arab Israelis. (Streaming on ChaiFlicks.) — MH