Twenty Twenty-Three was a weird year for television. Part of that was the WGA/SAG strikes but beyond that the streaming world had become so large it felt like the talent was stretched too thin. Or maybe it was because the world was finally getting back to some sense of normalcy and I just didn’t watch as much. Pickins felt slimmer and this list, which I love writing, felt tougher to do.
Still there’s always good shows, be it new shows or returning favorites. This is not quite a Best TV of 2023 list because if it was that would include the final seasons of Succession and Barry, HBO’s adaptation of zombie videogame The Last of Us (you saw it), and the great new seasons of How to With John Wilson (2020 list), as well sas Slow Horses and Somebody Somewhere (which I included on last year’s list). There were also shows I thought I was going to love but didn’t (Justified: City Primeval, Lessons in Chemistry), and ones I couldn’t bring myself to watch (Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, I will get to you eventually).
What we have in this list are 14 shows released in 2023, most of which are new, but I did include a few new seasons of shows as well that either still deserve more attention or were so good I haven’t stopped thinking about them. Check out my list below.
The Bear Season 2 (FX / Hulu)
One of the viral hits of 2022, The Bear returned even stronger in its second season, retaining its crown for the most addictively bingeable show on TV. (I watched the whole thing in less than 24 hours.) Where the first season was a white-knuckle anxiety-fest, Season 2 somehow pivoted into the most feel-good, waterworks-inducing show since Friday Night Lights. This while still remaining the tightly wound story of Michelin-starred chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) who is trying to turn the family’s Chicago sandwich shop into a fine dining destination. As the restaurant undergoes renovations, all the characters get more time to shine, including Lionel Boyce as The Bear‘s pastry chef, and Liza Colón-Zayas as line cook Tina, who gets some of the show’s biggest happy-tears moments. For those who miss the tension, they squeeze it all into a flashback episode set at a very dysfunctional Berzatto family Christmas dinner featuring Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s mom and a whole lot of famous people in guest-starring roles. The best episode, however, is the one that follows, a spotlight for Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s perpetually half-cocked Richie, who after years of drifting finds what may be his true calling. Season 2 verges on being an overstuffed cannoli with guest stars and globe-trotting subplots (including an unnecessary love interest for Carmy), but creator Christopher Storer never lets it burst, turning The Bear into an even more satisfying second helping.
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Fargo Season 5 (FX / Hulu)
Noah Hawley’s small-screen adaptation of the Coen Brothers’ 1996 classic, Fargo was a bit of a marvel when it debuted. The fact that he “remixed” elements of the movie into a 10-episode series that echoed the original but was its own story was amazing enough; that it came back for a second season that told an entirely new story that was even better than the first was miraculous. The anthology series stumbled a bit in its third season and then fizzled in its ambitious fourth while trying to stretch the limits of the universe Hawley created. (S4 was not bad, but wasn’t satisfying in the way the first two seasons were.) Three years later, Fargo is finally back with a bit of course-correcting in Season 5, returning to the land of “Minnesota nice,” where disdain hides behind a lot of smiles and “you betchas.” This is also the closest the show has come to being set in current times (fall 2019) which allows it to explore the sociopolitical culture divide, “alternative facts,” the debt crisis and more, along with the usual schemes gone wrong, shocking violence, and pitch-black humor. Ted Lasso‘s Juno Temple stars as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon, a midwestern housewife whose turbulent past catches up with her in the form of North Dakota Sheriff Roy Tillman (John Hamm, having a lot of fun playing a very evil dude) who has been searching for her for years. The cast also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh (who was in actual Coen Brothers movie The Hudsucker Proxy) as Dot’s rich, conservative mother-in-law, Stranger Things‘ Joe Keery as Roy’s dim bulb son/deputy, Gator, and Sam Spruell as a drifter who might actually be a mythological immortal being. In addition to tons of Coen Bros easter eggs scattered throughout, Fargo S5 also owes more than a little to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and Home Alone. It’s still airing as of this writing but I’m really enjoying it.
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A Murder at the End of the World (FX / Hulu)
Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who brought us The OA, created this very 2023 spin on the Agatha Christie-style whodunnit. A Murder at the End of the World stars Emma Corrin as Darby Hart, an unsolved murder enthusiast and amateur sleuth who has written an acclaimed true crime book The Silver Doe. She is one of eight “great minds” invited by AI tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) to a creative retreat to discuss climate crisis solutions. Guests include an astronaut, a hacker, a filmmaker, a radical activist, and someone from Darby’s past she was not expecting to be there. The first night of the retreat, one of the guests turns up dead and while many think it was accidental, Darby is convinced it was murder. Many people I know are big fans of The OA but I am not one of them, and didn’t rush to watch this, but Marling and Batmanglij hooked me immediately this time. They handle the show’s two main stories — present day Iceland and flashbacks involving the mystery in her book — with skill and style, and incorporate the series’ themes of AI, climate, and megawealth nearly as effortlessly. Marling and Batmanglij still haven’t figured out how to stick the landing, but I didn’t leave Murder baffled like I did with the first season of The OA. (Thankfully, this show features no interpretive dance sequences.) In addition to Owen, the cast includes Joan Chen and Brit Marling, but A Murder at the End of the World works almost entirely due to Emma Corrin — who memorably played Princess Di in The Crown — who delivers a star-making performance here. It’s worth watching for her alone.
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Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (Netflix)
Thirteen years after Scott Pilgrim Vs The World hit theaters, filmmaker Edgar Wright reunited the entire cast of the film for this Netflix animated series that remixed Brian Lee O’Malley’s original story while bringing it back to its graphic novel roots. As with the comic and the film, it is ostensibly the story of slacker Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) who falls for Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and must contend with her Seven Evil Exes. The first episode initially follows O’Malley’s graphic novel and the film almost shot-for-shot, but then it Takes Off, diverging wildly from the original and entirely reorienting the story’s point of view. O’Malley co-wrote the scripts with BenDavid Grabinski, updating things cleverly and giving each episode its own story arc while moving the bigger story forward. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny and more than a little meta, especially a subplot involving a movie adaptation of Scott’s life and a behind-the-scenes documentary about it. Director Abel Góngora gives everything an anime feel while Anamanaguchi (also returning from the movie) add 8-bit side-scrolling street cred with their score. Like Damon Lindeloff’s Watchmen series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a reimagining worthy of the source material.
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Telemarketers (HBO / MAX)
These days we’re experiencing a glut of biopic-style movies and TV shows about companies and products instead of people — see Tetris, Blackberry, The Dropout, Air, etc — but better than all those is this documentary about those damn telemarketers that call right when you or your aunt are sitting down to dinner. Well, specifically one subset. The three-part series was co-directed by Sam Lipman-Stern, who in 2001 was a 14-year-old high school dropout and skater in New Jersey who took a job as a telemarketer for the Civic Development Group, that, he was told, raised money for the Fraternal Order of Police. On his first day, he found a call center office that was very amenable to his lifestyle, one that literally allowed anything — booze, drugs, sex, you name it — to happen on premises as long as quotas were met. During the seven years he worked at CDG his co-workers were a wild bunch of deviants, including Patrick J. Pespas, a charismatic telemarketing vet who could talk anyone out of money and was also a heroin addict, and their boss Big Ed, who actually encouraged Sam to bring in his camcorder and film after Sam joked “this company should be a documentary.” It turned out there was an actual story here, as Pepsas revealed to Sam that almost none of the money raised was actually going to charity. Pepsas and Sam vowed to expose the scam but the SEC beat them to it, shutting down CDG in 2010. But there was still more to the story. The Safdie Brothers serve as executive producers and you can feel their twisted fingerprints all over this series that is equal parts cringe comedy, muckraking expose, and paranoid thriller. Some of the crazier details are better left experienced by watching it, but Telemarketers is basically unspoilable because there’s so much wild shit that went on, caught on tape, it’s hard to actually believe until you see it.
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I’m a Virgo (Amazon)
Boots Riley, the onetime leader of indie rap group The Coup who made 2018’s great indie film Sorry to Bother You, created this equally unique absurdist coming-of-age comedy. I’m A Virgo is set in an alternate reality Oakland, CA where people people with superhuman abilities live among normal humans. Our hero, of sorts, is Cootie (Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot-tall and very strong teenager who until recently was sheltered from the world (and TV and fast food) by his aunt and uncle. He’s forbidden to leave before his 21st birthday but ventures out two years early, and is befriended by a group of social activists, exploited by a variety of white people, and seen as a long-promised savior by a local cult. Then there’s tech billionaire Jay Whittle (Walton Goggins), the creator of Cootie’s favorite comic, ‘The Hero,’ who moonlights as a costumed vigilante and lives in a tower high above the rest of the city. Like Sorry to Bother You, Riley is swinging for the fences with I’m a Virgo; it’s wildly ambitious, not exactly subtle with its metaphors, and kind of a mess, but most of it works. There’s too much awesome here to complain about the misses, and I appreciate his use of old school special effects, animation, and puppetry to tell this sideways superhero origin story. I also appreciate that he got Amazon to fund a fantasy where Capitalism is the true supervillain. That it exists at all is reason enough for celebration.
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Mrs. Davis (Peacock)
Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Watchmen, LOST) and Tera Hernandez (The Big Bang Theory) co-created this wildly entertaining and totally out-there series about a nun named Simone (Betty Gilpin) who has been tasked by an all-powerful Artificial Intelligence (Mrs Davis) for a mythic quest. Most of the world thinks Mrs. Davis, who has solved many of the world’s problems, is great, but Simone sees it as evil incarnate. She agrees to Mrs. Davis’s offer when the program promises her if she succeeds it will shut down for good. This quest involves her ex boyfriend, Wiley (Jake McDorman), her current husband, Jesus Christ (Andy McQueen), an eccentric Australian billionaire (a very funny Chris Diamantopoulos) who leads an anti-Mrs Davis resistance group, and The Knights of the Templar, who as we all know protect the Holy Grail. You are likely to be as confused to what’s going on at first as Simone, but Mrs Davis keeps you very entertained until the dots start connecting, which they do in surprising, fun, often hilarious and throught-provoking ways. Betty Gilpin, who you may know from GLOW, is a fantastic in the starring role, and the cast also includes Ben Chaplin, David Arquette, Elizabeth Marvel, and character actress Margo Martindale.
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Beef (Netflix)
One of Netflix’s most popular series of 2023, Beef is also the best thing the streaming giant released this year, if not longer. If you haven’t seen it, comedian Ali Wong and Steven Yeun (Walking Dead, Minari) — who played actual lovebirds on Tuca & Bertie — star as opposite sides of a road rage incident that begins at a big box store parking lot and ends on the streets of Los Angeles. Danny (Yeun) is a struggling contractor and eldest son who is trying to save enough money to bring his parents over from Korea and build them a house; Amy (Wong) is small business owner and aspiring business mogul with an aspiring artist husband and a disapproving mother. Both think of the other in broad stereotypes and can’t let the incident go; things, as they say, escalate quickly and become a full-on war. Beef never treads water across its 10 episodes, zooming in and out of Danny and Amy’s lives, revealing the cracks and fissures that led to this massive interpersonal earthquake. Show creator Lee Sung Jin worked with Yeun and Wong to bring a lot of cultural (and personal) specificity and nuance to Beef, which goes from dark comedy to tragedy to Lynchian nightmare territory while holding a mirror up to 2023 America.
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The Gold (Paramount+)
From The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Reservoir Dogs, “heist gone wrong” tales are hard to resist, and this BBC/Paramount+ co-production is a satisfying doozy. It’s also based on a true story. In 1983, a group of small-time London criminals got a tip that £1 million in cash would be kept at the Brinks-Mat security warehouse at Heathrow airport. When they got there, they found something else: £26 million in gold bullion, which resulted in the biggest robbery in Britain. They escape with the gold, but the problem is how to get rid of and launder the stamped gold bricks. Among the ne’er do wells involved: career criminal Kenneth Noye (Slow Horses‘ Jack Lowden) who is seen as a community leader and has friends on the police force; shady “gold for cash” dealer John “Goldfinger” Palmer (John Cullen) who has a smelter in his garden shed; real estate developer Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper, no relation) and his seedier associate Gordon Perry (Sean Harris). A big part of what makes The Gold so satisfying is that it’s equally about the detectives assigned to the case (Hugh Bonneville, Charlotte Spencer, and Emun Elliott), who through dogged legwork finally cracked the case. The story is especially meaty, involving police corruption, greedy gentrifiers, the Freemasons, Liechtenstein, courtroom theatrics, and grisly violence. Bonus: the series has great taste in music, with a original era post-punk soundtrack featuring songs by New Order, Joy Division, Echo & The Bunnymen, Gang of Four, Depeche Mode, The Fall, The Cure, Bronski Beat, The Smiths, and more.
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Party Down (Starz)
Are we having fun yet? Finally, yes! Almost nobody saw two-season sitcom Party Down when it originally aired on Starz in the late-’00s, but in the 15 years since, the show — about a Los Angeles catering company staffed by a cross-section of low-level Hollywood types — entered the modern cult cannon. It also featured a cast that would soon become much more famous, including Adam Scott, Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, Ken Marino, Megan Mullally and more. After years of talk about a third season, the stars (Starz) aligned and it finally happened, with nearly with all the cast returning (Lizzy Caplan was shooting Fleishman is in Trouble at the time and couldn’t make it work). The premise and format of the show — failed entertainment industry people in a go-nowhere job, with every episode a new catering gig — felt custom designed for revisiting these loveable losers 15 years later where, sadly, not a lot has changed. In the six episodes of Season 3, the writing is as sharp as ever and you can tell everyone was glad to be back, with a few great new cast members added, including Zoe Chao as Party Down’s new chef with molecular gastronomy aspirations, and Jennifer Garner as Adam Scott’s new love interest. It’s Ken Marino, though, who remains the heart of the show and biggest laugh-getter as Party Down manager Ron, whose ability to get in humiliating situations knows no nadir. The whole season is great, but “KSGY-95 Prizewinner’s Luau,” directed by Marino, is an instant classic involving the whole gang out of their minds on magic mushrooms while working a private private luau party for the winners of a Sting concert contest. The only downside of S3 is it was too short — let’s hope everyone can find time for a fourth season sooner rather than later.
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Poker Face (Peacock)
Rian Johnson, the writer-director behind such films as Knives Out and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, created this series that puts a modern-day spin on a 1970s TV staple: the detective series. Poker Face takes a few different classic shows and mashes them together in a very modern way. It’s part Columbo (right down to the font and color of the opening titles) and part The Incredible Hulk (or The Fugitive) with a little Murder She Wrote and Veronica Mars in there too. The series stars Natasha Lyonne, in a role written with her in mind, as Charlie, a down-on-her-luck woman who has the gift/curse of being able to instantly tell when anyone is lying. While working as a cocktail waitress at a low-rent casino on the Nevada/Arizona border, a friend and coworker turns up dead. She figures out who did it, but unfortunately, that also puts her on the run. Every episode is a new town and a new dead body, with Charlie somehow involved every time. (“I’m kinda a death magnet,” she says at one point.) Big Name Guest Stars show up in every episode and, like Columbo, you see the murder happen first so it’s not “whodunnit” so much as “how does she then catch ’em.” While the case-of-the-week structure is very old school network television, the continuing storyline is very current Peak TV. It’s also often hilarious, directed with tons of style, and shot on film (something you can’t say about most 2023 movies.) As with Knives Out, Johnson and his team of writers and directors cleverly plot the episodes, though some of the murderers are not so smart. The best episode involves a washed up alt-metal band whose members include Chloe Sevigny and The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle. Poker Face would show your grandparents that there are much better mystery procedurals than those CBS shows they watch every night…if they could only figure out how to use the Roku you bought them for the holidays. If you’re tired of waiting for S2, Peacock also has every episode of Columbo and Murder She Wrote to stream as well.
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Reservation Dogs (FX / Hulu)
This FX/Hulu series was one of my 2021 TV picks and it only got better with its two subsequent seasons, though despite all the critical praise it still feels like no one watched this show. Creator Sterlin Harjo decided to end things this year after Season 3 and the show certainly went out on a high note. The series originally centered around a group of Indigenous teenagers living in rural Oklahoma who dreamed of leaving the reservation and going to California, but soon expanded to involve the rest of the town and beyond. Those California dreams came true — the big city was not quite the paradise they expected, though — but that is only one of many wonderful plot threads that primarily serve as a way for us to spend more time with these complicated, nuanced characters. Reservation Dogs also made time for a few standalone bottle episodes, more than a little magical realism (plus a smidge of sci-fi), and a few big-name guest stars that I won’t spoil here. (If you loved Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, though, she is among the uniformly great recurring cast.) One of the best shows of this decade, Reservation Dogs is a great “hang” and though it would be great to have more of it, we should all be excited for whatever Sterlin Harjo has planned next.
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Cunk on Earth (Netflix)
Charlie Brooker, the man who has made us fear the near future and our smartphones via his series Black Mirror, created this fake documentary series hosted by the hilariously ill-informed Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan). She is presented as a David Attenborough type, but it’s instantly clear she has no clue about history, geology, geography, or much of anything at all, but never lets that stop her from pontificating. When not visiting locations around the globe, she is interviewing actual experts a la Ali G, though her subjects seem at least a little in on the joke. “It’s almost unbelievable that before Charles Darwin invented evolution in 1859 no had ever evolved,” is a typical Cunk observation, delivered in total deadpan. “Without him, none of us would be here today, except in the form of fossils or gibbons.” There are also a number of great recurring bits, like Cunk’s proclivity for putting many historical events in context of today by letting us know how many years something happened before the release of Belgian techno anthem “Pump Up the Jam.” Cunk got her start on comic “week in review” series Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe a decade ago before being given her own series, Cunk on Britain, which led to Cunk on Earth. Her world seems endlessly expandable and we can only hope Cunk on America will be next.
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Drops of God (AppleTV+)
Drops of God is easily the most niche show on this list and is the kind of series you will likely either totally love or never make it past the first 10 minutes. I’m in the former and thank goodness for AppleTV+’s endlessly deep pockets that it exists in such luxuriant form. Based on a hit Japanese manga Kami no Shizuku, this series is set in a world where the death of renowned wine critic Alexandre Léger is front page news, as is who will be the heir to his $150 million collection of rare vintage wine. His estranged daughter, Camille (Fleur Geffrier), seems to be the obvious recipient, but at the reading of the will she learns her father has constructed a three-part, very elaborate test of her tasting skills before she inherits his collection. She also learns that there is another competitor: her father’s Japanese protege, Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita). Unfortunately there’s one big hiccup: if Camille ingests even one drop of alcohol, she becomes violently ill, passing out and bleeding from her nose. But thus begins the globe-trotting challenge where Camille and Issei must revisit and overcome the past to achieve their future. Kami no Shizuku was already adapted into a Japanese series back in 2009 but this new high-budget French production moves the primary POV to Camille and tightens up the story considerably, while still making plenty of room for many twists and turns across its eight episodes. (This is a true limited series, there will be no Season 2.) Production values are through the roof with on-location shooting around the world and sumptuous cinematography worthy of the luxurious subject matter. Drops of God may not be for everyone, but for those with the taste it is immersive and intoxicating.
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Need more things to watch? check out our recent list of 10 New Documentaries to Stream Now and our 2022 TV list.
