Welcome to the 2024 SiftPop.com Sifties!
This year, the SiftPop writers came together to nominate five actors for Best Television Performance. Unlike the Emmys and other major awards shows, we didn’t differentiate between lead and supporting performances or between actors and actresses. This is simply a countdown of the five best performances that we collectively saw!
Between Arcane and Fallout,it was a great year for Ella Purnell in video game adaptations, but it’s her tortured voice performance as Jinx in Arcane that gets the nod here. The show is at its best when it’s about Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx. The sisters’ bond was the emotional heart of the show in Season One, and it largely remains so in Season Two. After the devastating end to Season One, Purnell is able to give a performance that’s much more than the expected descent into madness. She gets moments of hope that are portrayed with just as much pathos as the moments of tragedy, which in turn just make the latter so much more devastating. Purnell gets the spotlight to kick off the series finale, and manages to tear the audience’s heart effectively in two. It’s a show whose effectiveness relies as much on its ability to tug on the heartstrings as its ability to stun visually, and Purnell is the biggest reason why.
The first season of Shrinking felt like a breath of fresh air in Harrison Ford’s career. He’d spent roughly the past decade almost exclusively reprising decades-old roles and showing up in other assorted sequels and IPs. But then Ford showed up on Shrinking as an out-of-touch, crotchety old man figure, while also wrestling with his own shortcomings as a father and husband. The Season Two finale features a scene which drives home Ford as the clear highlight of the show’s incredibly talented cast. It really makes you wonder whether, in a career as celebrated as Ford’s, a late-career supporting role on a secondary streaming platform might just be his best.
At first glance, Sofia Falcone is a character that seems pretty basic. But as you dive deeper into her story, she is a far more layered antagonist than you could imagine. Brought to life brilliantly by Cristin Milioti, it’s great that the world has now seen what she’s capable of. Sofia blurs the line between a legitimate candidate for someone who can inherit the Falcone criminal family enterprise, and someone whose sanity is teetering on the brink of collapse. Her relationship with Oswald comes to a head so dramatically and brilliantly that it turns the tide in the series in grizzly ways. Even with some of the poor hand she’s been dealt by her family, Sofia turns into the monster that everyone assumes that she is due to her treatment at the hands of the staff and inmates at Arkham. Without Milioti shepherding this story, we wouldn’t be treated to such a spectacular character, who is oozing with rage yet crafty enough to go after what she wants.
In Shōgun, Mariko could have easily been merely a translator who fell into similar traps as women in older eras in history, such as feudal Japan. In fact, in the 1980 miniseries of the same name, Mariko is closer to how the history books would portray women of this time: subservient and accommodating. Sawai manages to change the course of this character’s history, making her stronger than before, featuring a much more compelling backstory. Sawai brings such a vibrancy to Mariko, as she is one of the only characters who can understand what everyone is saying. This makes her so much more vital to the story, and Mariko is easily the best character in the series. Sawai even gives one of the strongest performances by any actor on television in a long time. She’s tough, strong-willed, and still features in emotionally charged scenes. Her scenes in the penultimate episode are the strongest of the series, and Sawai deserves all the accolades she’s received for Shōgun.
Even after a three-hour movie and an eight-episode show, it’s still difficult to reconcile that the Penguin is Colin Farrell. The makeup and the voice are just so pitch-perfect that they’ve transformed one of Hollywood’s most beautiful men into one of the most despicable characters that television has seen in a long time. Taking queues from shows like Game of Thrones, Oswald is a master manipulator, and one who triumphs the most by pitting multiple cons and schemes against so many different people that it can be hard to keep track of. The Penguin does a great job of showing Cobb’s humanity, only to pull the rug from the audience in some pretty unimaginable ways. At the center of Cobb being one of the most nimble characters in television is Farrell doing some career-best work. He elevates not only the character of Oz, but the entire genre of superhero television and DC properties as a whole. We now have a new standard for villains and characters on superhero shows, and Farrell is the flag bearer for a new era of immersive acting on TV.
Make sure to check out the previous 2024 Sifties winner!
And don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the winner of Best Television Show!