Every TV Show Stephen King Recommended In 2024

Stephen King is one of the most prolific acclaimed authors working today, yet he still finds time to watch — and weigh in on — plenty of TV shows and movies each year. Historically, King’s quick takes have lived on X (formerly known as Twitter), but just last month the author made the wise move to shut down his popular account on the Musk-owned site for good. “I quit Twitter,” King wrote on Threads in November. “Eleven years, man. It really changed. Grew dark.”

When the man behind some of the most messed-up horror stories of the past two centuries calls a website dark, you know something’s going wrong. At any rate, King immediately picked up his watercooler conversation where it left off, once again recommending new titles that are challenging, intriguing, and (as his random endorsement of “The Flash” last year reminded us) not always guaranteed to be good. Still, plenty of the TV shows King has shined a spotlight on this year are excellent, while even the lesser ones feature stellar hooks that will get you on board — at least temporarily — from the very first episode. By our count, the master of horror has recommended nine different shows in 2024. Here’s everything he’s said about them.

King kicked off the 2024 TV season with a show that he loved so immediately that he recommended it after just one episode. In February, the author took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his love for “The Tourist,” the Australia-set comedic thriller starring “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “The Fall” alum Jamie Dornan. “Don’t know what happens after the first episode, but the opening chapter is flat-out terrific,” King wrote in a tweet that (along with his other posts) was seemingly deleted when he exited the site. He concluded that the show’s debut was “exciting, suspenseful, mysterious…and full of the kindness of strangers to someone down on his luck.”

Originally a BBC and Max co-production, “The Tourist” follows an Irish man with amnesia, played by Dornan, who wakes up in the Australian outback with no recollection of his past. Though the initial premise sounds like it would result in a “Bourne Legacy”-like action saga, reviews indicate that season 1 of “The Tourist” is more of a slow burn — albeit one with some surprising moments of payoff. The show sees Dornan’s character, at first just called The Man, trying to figure out why people want him dead while also reconnecting with a woman (Shalom Brune-Franklin) who claims to have a connection to his past. “The Tourist” eventually returned for a second, equally critically acclaimed season, and both are now available on Netflix.

The first of several trippy sci-fi shows on this list, “Constellation” debuted on Apple TV+ in February and earned King’s seal of approval just over a week after its three-episode premiere. The series stars Noomi Rapace (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”), James D’Arcy (“Avengers: Endgame”), and Jonathan Banks (“Better Call Saul”), but thanks to the oversaturation of brainy and star-powered yet under-advertised science fiction shows on Apple TV+, it’s totally possible you’ve never heard of it. King decided to get the word out in early March, noting on X that “The first 2 episodes of CONSTELLATION are just about perfect–nail-biting and believable. The question is whether or not it can stick the landing.”

It’s a question that King himself is all too familiar with, and unfortunately for “Constellation,” not everybody watching at home thought the show ended in a satisfying way. “It often feels like confusion masquerading as profundity,” Pajiba’s Dustin Rowles wrote in a review of the show, “like a high-school essay that uses a lot of thesaurus words to disguise the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about.” The show’s basic plot is intriguing enough: Rapace plays an astronaut who survives a disaster at the International Space Station, staying behind to make repairs after a mysterious collision while her coworkers all head back to earth. When she returns, the world is not quite as she knew it before, and she begins to experience memory gaps. It’s a promising premise, and though the show proved divisive, it also has its fans — King among them.

King loved Richard Gadd’s harrowing and raw autobiographical drama “Baby Reindeer” so much that he wrote an entire column about it. The show is about an ambivalent stand-up comic (Gadd) who ends up embroiled in a psychologically torturous, years-long quasi-relationship with his stalker (a tremendous Jessica Gunning) after humoring her initial advances for selfish reasons. Gutsy and gutting, “Baby Reindeer” hit Netflix in April and immediately kicked off a half-dozen different discourses and controversies, from much-needed discussions about male sexual assault to finger-pointing related to Gadd’s failure to change identifying details of certain real-life people involved in the drama.

By May, King was writing in the Times that the powerhouse sixth episode of “Baby Reindeer” was “one of the best things [he’s] ever seen on television (or in the movies, for that matter).” He’s not alone: the show racked up several Emmys this fall and landed a prime spot on our list of the best TV of 2024. On a personal level, it made me sick to my stomach while simultaneously impressing me more than almost anything else I watched this year. King’s essay notes the similarities between its allegedly mostly true story and the plot of his book “Misery,” and he says that he first came across the series when an acquaintance told him that “in his opinion it made ‘Misery,’ both the book I wrote and the movie, look like a kids’ cartoon.”

Alexander Woo, David Benioff, and D. B. Weiss’ long-anticipated adaptation of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” finally made its appearance on Netflix in March of 2024, but it took a couple months for Uncle Stevie to get around to it. In May, the author told his X followers that the dense and dreamy show is an “Extraordinary science fiction series–sprawling, thought-provoking, immersive.” He also isn’t averse to explaining what the enigmatically marketed sci-fi show is really about, adding that “the scenes of ‘first contact’ are chilling and awe-inspiring.”

“Awe-inspiring” is a great word for “3 Body Problem,” a series that asks massive questions about the role of humankind in the galaxy at large — and delivers chilling answers. The show features several plot points that shouldn’t really cohere, from a countdown clock inside the eyelids of certain scientists to a VR headset with extraterrestrial connections to a slow-burn drama played out against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution. It also features bizarrely gross yet contextually relevant scenes of ultra-thin wire cutting through human bodies and deflated people being unrolled like sleeping bags, among other things. The series’ writers do their best to synthesize Cixin’s brainy, strange, existential story, and though the show gets overly-gloomy at times, it’s a compelling watch.

King was so into “3 Body Problem” that he also watched the original Chinese adaptation of the book, which he described on X as “harder SF, but the implications of its later episodes are terrifying, Lovecraftian.” That series is called “Three-Body,” and it premiered in 2023 while the American version was still bogged down by a complex production and, er, a real-life murder.

Horror master and social media regular King has been known to recommend shows early (perhaps too early) in their run, but he actually switched course this summer when he started praising a great show that was on its way out the door. “Evil,” the clever, creepy, funny, and wholly original Paramount+ series about a trio of varyingly skeptical characters investigating demonic cases for the Catholic church, got the King stamp of approval in an interview with PBS News (shared on X by series star Katja Herbers).

“There’s a show called ‘Evil’ on Paramount+ that I like,” King told PBS News. “It’s great. It’s funny and it’s witty and it’s very, very sharp.” Though the clip doesn’t mention as much, “Evil” was already in its final season by the time King recommended it, and it concluded with a fantastic season that wrapped up its creative, subversive take on our real-life hellscape while still leaving the door open for a potential future return. Herbers reposted King’s endorsement with a caption calling for the show’s renewal, and fans soon began doing the same across social media. King may not have meant to start a minor movement, but he made his position on the matter clear when he tweeted about the show soon after: “Dear Paramount+: More EVIL, please.” So far, the streamer has yet to deliver, but we’re still holding out hope to see what happens next to cute-as-a-button Antichrist baby Timothy.

Few horror shows released this year had as much potential as “Teacup,” the high-concept Peacock series that was marketed as event television — and counted modern horror maestro James Wan among its executive producers. “Teacup” didn’t exactly turn out to be a phenomenon, dividing critics and audiences alike according to Rotten Tomatoes. Still, the show has a cool, ambiguous hook that caught King’s eye. Its trailers featured a Georgia family whose farm is invaded by a strange, to-be-revealed threat. Yvonne Strahovski (“Chuck,” “Dexter”), Scott Speedman (“The Strangers,” “Grey’s Anatomy”), and Chaske Spencer (“Wild Indian,” “Echo”) star, as does a creepy man in a gas mask who spray-paints a line around the Chenoweth family’s property and says they have to stay within it to be safe.

King hyped the show ahead of its release, posting that he’d recommend “Teacup” to anyone who enjoyed two other noteworthy puzzle box shows. “TEACUP: If you like FROM or LOST, I think you’ll enjoy this,” King wrote. “It’s strange, creepy, claustrophobic, and scary.” Always appreciative of a condensed runtime (despite his own knack for writing doorstop novels), King said the show’s episodes are “all killer, no filler.” He also mentioned the unsettling, anonymous man who kick-starts the show’s drama, posting “beware the Gas Mask Man” at the end of his capsule review. We won’t spoil the show’s mysteries for you here, but it’s worth noting that “Teacup” is based on the book “Stinger,” from popular horror novelist Robert R. McCammon.

Just like the rest of us, King seems to get more time to watch (and subsequently recommend) TV shows around the holiday season. In November, the author moved from X to the Meta-owned social media site Threads, and quickly picked up where he’d left off in terms of TV talk. Around Thanksgiving, King posted an endorsement of “Before,” another super-mysterious show hoping to connect with audiences in its first season. “This show has a creepy ‘EXORCIST’ vibe, and Billy Crystal is very good,” King wrote, adding that it also has “short and scary episodes.”

A brief time commitment and a leading role for one of the best comedic actors of all time are pretty great selling points, but “Before,” which just wrapped its first season, is far from universally embraced. The show has only earned an endorsement from one in three critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes, and while twice as many audience members seem to like it, that still leaves plenty who were left wanting more from the Apple TV+ series. Still, I’d say “Before” is worth checking out simply for the novelty of seeing “When Harry Met Sally” and “Monsters, Inc.” star Crystal transition to horror. The comedian plays a widowed child psychologist who encounters a seemingly disturbed kid, only to discover that the new patient has some connection to his own life.

King’s latest small-screen recommendation is the only show on this list that didn’t drop a new season this year. The novelist and short story writer apparently discovered “The Midwich Cuckoos” on Amazon this month, and recently shared his praise for it on Threads. “Surprised there hasn’t been more talk about this,” King wrote. “It’s a brilliant re-imagining of John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi/horror novel.”

As you might expect, “The Midwich Cuckoos” is another series built around a freaky, logic-defying central mystery. The 2022 series comes from England’s platform Sky Max, and it focuses on a village in the U.K. where all of the women suddenly fall pregnant after the whole town has a period of unconsciousness. “It’s A Sin” actress Keeley Hawes stars as the doctor who studies the women and their unusual offspring (she was spared since she was out of town the day of the event), while “Hijack” actor Max Beesley plays the cop who suspects the situation may have an explanation that lies outside our solar system. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s based on Wyndham’s 1957 book, which was turned into the famed creepy-kid horror movie “Village of the Damned” three years later. Nothing sets the tone for a new year quite like a story about killer alien children, right?