The Best TV Cinematography of 2024

‘Disclaimer’

Alfonso Cuaron’s limited series is an exercise in weaving between multiple perspectives, a choir of voices (through different forms of voiceover) that are presenting “facts.” Working with longtime cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, who came aboard early as a producer on “Disclaimer,” the duo designed different cinematic languages to delineate the four narrative lines. But this wasn’t simply a matter of applying different color grades, switching lenses, or employing different types of camera movement. They also brought aboard six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel to split duties with Lubezki, not from episode to episode, but rather each taking on a narrative line across all seven episodes, to give each the perspective of a different artist. The results are not only subtle, but visually stunning and emotionally resonant, placing an emotional fingerprint of each narrator on the image. In particular, their use of picking precise times of day to shoot — the shot of Catherine (Cate Blanchett) returning, with her tail between her legs, to her mother’s house at dusk a perfect distillation of character — are among the best shots of the year, in film or TV. —COF

‘Expats’

With “The Farewell” and now “Expats,” director Lulu Wang has established herself as a master of the long take. The slowly evolving and subtly shifting drama of Wang’s blocking and compositions is made possible by her partnership with cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano, whose lighting and lensing brings a wealth of textures, layers, and elegance to Wang’s cinema of restraint. In the hands of Franquesa-Solano, a slightly high-angle frame of a woman standing in sliding glass doors during a rain storm, is more dynamic and visually overwhelming than any epic battle.

Franquesa-Solano and Wang masterfully draw our eyes deeper into frames that never wear out their welcome, slowly revealing richness, depth, and story. Franquesa-Solano finds the grandness in the lived-in, soft swathes of light in the overcast, and the pop of color in the gray, as each scene captures the sense of transience of characters stuck between worlds. In Episode 5, Wang purposely adopts a wider frame and slightly more muscular cinematic approach, and it’s a joy to watch Franquesa-Solano flex and show a range that will likely earn her an Emmy nomination. —CO

‘Fantasmas’

There’s a ghostly glow to everything in “Fantasmas” that gives Julio Torres’s heightened, handmade world a beautiful sense of possibility to go along with all the strangeness, mermaids, and robots. Cinematographer Sam Levy pulled from the way video games draw our eyes and avant-garde musical acts to create strong pops of color amid an otherwise dreamy visual style that pulls viewers into each new landscape, whether it is a stage selling bejeweled toilet seats or the green screen stage of a reality series laid bare in all of its artifice. It’s great to see a TV series not just try to look glossy and cinematic but push the stops of its visual style. Levy’s work using rear projection and some old-school tricks makes the show look as bespoke as Torres’ imagination. —SS

‘Hacks’ Season 3

Back for Season 3 is cinematographer Adam Bricker, along with the stylish, poppy, yet grounded location-based look he brought to “Hacks” Season 1 and 2. One of the things that has defined Bricker’s work on the series is the refusal to be limited by the convention of half-hour comedy. That’s not to say “Hacks” has the somber dramatic look of “The Bear,” Bricker makes lighting and lensing choices that lean into the colorful and slightly vintage world of legendary performer Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) to set the tone for the comedy. It’s more that the cinematic language Bricker and executive producer/director Lucia Aniello developed is character-driven, malleable to where it can reflect the emotionally fraught places its characters go, as the relationship between Deborah and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) can be as abusive, manipulative, and co-dependent as the industry they work in. The cinematography of the series matches the tricky balance of the writing: as satirical as it can be of the world of Hollywood power brokers, Ava’s liberal white girl privilege, and Deborah’s gaudiness, Bricker’s camera will find some element of both the warmth and loneliness of these settings it is skewering.

What makes Bricker’s Season 3 work particularly impressive is as the series continues to venture away from the locations that defined its look (the glamour of Deborah’s home, the backstage world of Vegas hotels and stages), the cinematographer is able to incorporate (while working on short production schedule) wildly different locales into the distinct “Hacks” look and feel. Season 3 seamlessly incorporates entire fish-out-of-water episodes, in distinctly non “Hacks” surroundings (a golf course, a college campus, and the Pennsylvania Forrest), without skipping a beat. —CO

‘Pachinko’ Season 2

Ante Cheng’s and Sofian El Fani’s cinematography in “Pachinko” is as emotive and epic as the series itself. The compositions across all eight episodes of Season 2 are always layered and revealing, even when characters are at an impasse. The camera never sections off the different timelines of the show; the past feels present and the present feels heavy with the echo of the past. El Fani’s work on the black-and-white opening of Episode 5 and some of Cheng’s creative framing of conversations between Noa (Tae Ju Kang) and Sunja (Minha Kim) are particularly exemplary. But throughout “Pachinko,” Cheng and El Fani craft images that deepen our sense of the story, and the characters’ desires to connect. —SS

‘Ren Faire’

HBO’s three-part docuseries is as visually striking and sweeping as any other series in the streamer’s illustration library. Not concerned with a verite version of documenting reality, director Lance Oppenheim and cinematographer Nate Hurtsellers collaborate with their subjects (who are by profession cosplay performers at a Texas Renaissance Fair) to get at the emotional truth, therefore giving themselves access to all the tools of narrative filmmaking. That, though, does not explain the grandeur and richness of Hurtsellers’ work. Still shooting with the limitations of a small crew, in an environment of a blasting Texas sun he can’t control, the cinematographer manages to give “Ren Faire” the look, texture, and color grade of a David Lean technicolor epic. The camera glides with its subjects, capturing their psychological state, but also (especially in Episode 1) allows us moments to enter the transportive fantasy world of attending the festival. Oppenheim says his series is a cross of “Vanderpump Rules” and “There Will Be Blood,” and what’s remarkable about the director and cinematographers work here is the ability to touch both the heightened drama and the-pulling-back-the-curtain on campy theatrics in equal measure, all at the service of setting the table for what becomes a Shakespearean succession drama that deepens with each act. —CO

‘Ripley’

The black and white cinematography of Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”) is, as you’d imagine, stunning, but maybe not in the way you imagined. While the 1999 movie adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was a lush, sun-drench fantasy, writer/director Steven Zaillian’s limited series is a clear-eyed study of the sociopath at the heart of the novel. Elswit follows suit with a study of light and dark that is as sharp and precisely executed as we’ve seen in recent memory (with the notable exception of Bruno Delbonnel’s work in “The Tragedy of Macbeth”). Elswit’s ability to control the light working partially on location on the Italian coastline goes beyond his considerable talents and speaks to the level of planning and care for detail that went into every frame of this series. The black and white of the frame, combined with the intricate geometry of the mise-en-scène, results in some of the most exquisitely crafted and intricate compositions, each of which tells a story — Elswit and Zaillian are not subtle in using the literal light and dark of the image as metaphor.

While the series starts in the crisp, classical black-and-white photography of the period, it becomes more abstract and expressionistic at night once violence is unleashed. The use of shadow on the stairs as Andrew Scott tries to remove the body is deliciously noir, and the nighttime exteriors are anything but naturalistic, almost feeling as if they were shot on a sound stage. There are moments like this where Elswit reaches for the light of the Caravaggio paintings built into the storyline. —CO

‘Shōgun’

It makes complete narrative sense for the world of “Shogun” to be as polished, cool, strange, and beautiful as the nobles vying for power within it. The show looks like Mariko’s (Anna Sawai) court poetry feels. But that required cinematographer’s Mark Laliberté, Sam McCurdy, Christopher Ross, and Aril Wretbled to all strike a balance between, say, lingering on how the sharpness of the light on a forest path creates moments of piercing natural beauty and getting down into the grubbiness of a prison cell, which somehow made its English prisoner, John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), look like even more of a barbarian. The show’s directors and camera team continually find ways to frame up characters so that they appear to express emotion past the rigid way they’re blocked or in a more potent way because of the sharp, strict composition. The camera on “Shogun” shows us all the layers of each of the characters’ eight-fold fence but leaves us the gift of guessing what might lie within. —SS

‘Somebody Somewhere’

As one is wont to do when a great series ends, I immediately started rewatching “Somebody Somewhere” after its euphoric series finale. I just wanted to stay in Manhattan, Kansas, a little longer, with Sam (Bridget Everett), Joel (Jeff Hiller), and especially Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison). (Her cunt pillows are the season’s must-have holiday gift, even though — or perhaps because — HBO isn’t selling them.) And as happy as it made me to click play on the pilot, knowing there were three seasons waiting for me to savor all over again, one immediate difference struck me: The first season is darker. Yes, the mood is a bit bleaker, since Sam just lost her sister, she’s yet to make friends with Joel, and Tricia is still defensively nasty (instead of delightfully so). But the show is also visibly darker in Season 1 — inside and outside, at home and at work, then-director of photography Jim Frohna (who only shot the first episode) leaned into his subject’s dour disposition so the hopeful spotlight she finds at episode’s end is even clearer in contrast.

“I remember Bridget saying that if we just sort of subtly feel sort of an opening up of the world as Sam opens up, that would be great,” co-creator Paul Thureen said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “We don’t have extreme close-ups on emotional moments. We have this real observational thing. […] We really wanted it to look like itself.”

Over the ensuing episodes, all helmed by director of photography Shana Hagan, “Somebody Somewhere” looked like little else on television. Scenes let in the natural light of its Midwest setting — the golden browns, the rich earth tones, and the bright pops of color that emphasized the irrepressible individuality of its charming leads. Season 3 showcased Hagan’s most striking work yet, as the strike-delayed production schedule shifted to a winter shoot for the first time. The starkness of the plains never overwhelmed the story and instead brought a fullness to the final season that felt fittingly resonant.

Long may we savor it. —Ben Travers

‘Sugar’

“Sugar” is a neo-noir that pays tribute to and heavily borrows from the narrative convention of the hard-boiled detective movies of the 1940s and ’50s. But when it comes to its cinematography, “Sugar” goes in the opposite direction of what you might expect, forgoing the low-key hard light and shadows of noir to capture the bright sun and saturated colors of Los Angeles in a more naturalistic fashion. That divide between genre and stylistic convention is intentional. Detective John Sugar (Colin Farrell) may have learned about humanity from old movies, but his from-a-different generation (possibly another planet) character makes him an outsider in this modern, gnarly backdrop. Director Fernando Meirelles’ longtime cinematographer César Charlone and cinematographer Richard Rutkowski’s constantly moving masters are less interested in shining a light on the dark mystery that Sugar is trying to solve and more invested in entering his meditative headspace. The cinematographers collect a seemingly infinite amount of different pieces of footage — a variety of angles, movement, abstract shots of light reflecting on the ceiling — each an expressive piece of what would become an edited tapestry that doesn’t look or feel like anything else on television. —CO

‘The Sympathizer’

Cinematographer Kim Ji-yong is responsible for some of the most beautiful, psychologically piercing imagery of recent memory in his collaboration with Park Chan-wook on “Decision to Leave.” On “The Sympathizer,” though, Kim gets to showcase the range of what he can do visually, aided and abetted by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd on Episode 4 of the HBO series. “The Sympathizer” has a lot going on: Transitions a-go-go, a protagonist who needs to feel increasingly trapped, paranoid, and disoriented, larger-than-life interlopers who can even take command of the show’s presentation, and the sense of multiple worlds and times overlapping, making it impossible for The Captain (Hoa Xuande) to truly feel like he belongs in any of them. Kim’s work here finds a perspective on the show’s many conceits and ’70s setting that feels like the cinematic equivalent of an author’s description, mixing modern glass and analog filming techniques and finding a distance on The Captain to make us feel like we’re spying on this conflicted spy. —SS

‘Tokyo Vice’ Season 2

Season 2 of “Tokyo Vice” broadened the scope of the series’ previous season, moving beyond the story of American reporter Jake Adelstein to take a more multi-faceted, ensemble-oriented look at Japan. Appropriately, cinematographers Daniel Satinoff and Corey Walter have expanded the visual language of the show to retain the sleek style of Season 1 but also find inspiration in new locations and characters. Tokyo itself remains a key guiding principle in terms of the look, as the cinematography takes its cues from the colors of the city. Yet this is not the neon-saturated world of “Black Rain” and other well-known films set in Tokyo; “Tokyo Vice” tends toward a more muted approach, in which grays, blues, and browns predominate. Where the show finds its vibrancy is in the lighting, which gives texture and shape to the characters and locations in the sculptural tradition favored by “Tokyo Vice” pilot director Michael Mann. Whether it’s the dynamism of the scenes involving the biker gang Adelstein infiltrates or the subtle tension of the love scenes following Adelstein’s increasingly complicated romantic entanglements, Satinoff and Walter always find unique ways of using light to express emotion — all the while reinforcing the 1990s setting without resorting to cliché. —JH

‘True Detective: Night Country’

The latest iteration of “True Detective” poses a fascinating problem for a cinematographer: The series takes place in a remote Alaskan town where it’s night 24 hours a day. Following director Issa López’s bold lead, director of photography Florian Hoffmeister leans into the darkness, creating a powerful feeling of eerie isolation in frames where characters often seem surrounded by nothing. “North Country” comes closest to the horror genre of any “True Detective” season (López has acknowledged John Carpenter films like “Prince of Darkness” and “The Thing” as influences), and Hoffmeister’s cinematography goes a long way toward creating the show’s anxiety-inducing sense of terror; he uses precisely targeted lighting to penetrate the darkness and guide the viewer’s eye exactly where he wants it, sometimes to reveal or conceal details of the mystery, sometimes to provide a nightmarish shock to the system. Most of all, Hoffmeister’s atmospheric lighting expresses both the loneliness and the rich inner lives of the characters, speaking for them with an intricate interplay between light and shadow when they won’t or can’t speak for themselves. —JH