There was plenty of good TV to be watched in 2023, but compiling my list did not make me all that excited for the future of the medium. Mostly because basically all of the shows appearing on this list are shows that I’d already been watching, and in fact, a lot of them were shows airing their final seasons. Now, it’s certainly on me to find new shows to watch, but this year, it just didn’t seem like there were as many new buzzworthy shows that everyone was talking about.
That, of course, could be for a few reasons, the most obvious one being that there was a writer’s strike this year that kept shows both new and old from airing seasons before the year’s end. Also, it seems like a lot of streaming services in the last year or two have indicated an emphasis on profits and producing less scripted entertainment, which has foreshadowed the possible end of “peak TV”. Which, honestly, felt like it was going to end sometime soon anyway. The amount of daring, off-beat shows that we got the past decade or so just never quite seemed sustainable, even though it was fun while it lasted. Well, with that somewhat depressing preamble out of the way, here are the shows that made 2023 memorable while it lasted.
Honorable Mention:
Ted Lasso (I liked the last season fine, but really struggled with them basically turning it into a one-hour show.)
Raylan Givens was back this year, and Justified: City Primeval was pretty good but maybe not the triumph it could’ve been. Timothy Olyphant still feels about as comfortable and charming as ever playing this character, and there was just enough of a fish-out-of-water freshness seeing him taken out of the Harlan County and placed in Detroit. It’s a little hard not to talk about this revival series without talking about its ending, so I’ll just say, even though Crime City didn’t always conjure that old Justified magic (mostly due to a good but not great main villain played by Boyd Holbrook), it’s ending had me pretty intrigued to see this creative team tackle another Justified series that truly delivers the goods.
I can only speculate why it took so long for Natasha Lyonne to become a TV star, because there aren’t many actresses that have such a specific energy and shaggy charm that you’d want to enjoy in episode after episode. While her Netflix series Russian Doll perhaps was a little too conceptually ambitious to take advantage of this in its second season, her new show Poker Face feels like a perfect fit for her energy.
Though I did enjoy its old-school “crime of the week” format, the fact that the show takes place in a different locale with a different set of characters each week (save for Lyonne’s Charlie Cale), it meant the episodes could be a little hit-or-miss, even if the guest stars were always pretty great. Luckily, this season mostly hit, while the steady hand of Rian Johnson as show creator and producer meant the various twists and double-crosses in the series felt more skillfully employed and inventive than your average crime show.
I don’t have much to say about What We Do In The Shadows, since it has made my Top 10 list the past few years and it’s clear that we’re all big fans of it. Still, that kind of consistency should not be taken for granted, since the show has managed to remain really funny despite the fact that there just haven’t been that many really funny comedies this decade. This is made all the more impressive that despite having kind of a typical sitcom dynamic for its characters, it always feels absurd and heightened in a way that really few other comedies have felt, perhaps due to the supernatural tinge of it all. Also, they always manage to work in an overarching storyline that’s a winner, and Guillermo’s tumultuous attempt to finally become a vampire this season is no exception.
Of the final seasons of recent TV shows that dropped this year, Barry was on the lower end, even though it was more or less just as surprising as ever. Perhaps it just wasn’t quite as engaging to get to the point where Barry is a full-on villain than it was watching him turn into one while the show embraced its darker qualities in its earlier seasons. Still, I think the last episode was really fantastic and felt true to the absurdist comedy that was key to the show’s tricky tone.
As the lone network TV show in this list, this is one where the show was really impacted by the writer’s strike, since the first half of the third season of Abbott Elementary didn’t end up airing at all in 2023. Still, the back half of season two saw the show becoming more and more confident and dependable in its ability to keep the workplace sitcom alive while seeing these actors really settle into these characters. While the show’s “will they/won’t they” romance between Janine and Gregory initially felt a little obligatory, the show managed to traverse these characters’ romance in a way that was satisfying, unpredictable, and left plenty more room for possibilities. Also, it wins bonus points for filming a pivotal moment at my current place of work.
Oh, I don’t know what to say about this one. We all love this show; it becomes an event with my stupid friend group whenever a new season drops, as well as a short-hand reference point for anyone with a desirably weird sense of humor. I wouldn’t mind if there were 55 more seasons of I Think You Should Leave.
How To With John Wilson was my #1 show the last two times it aired a season, and because there’s so little of it, yet so much of it is so strangely charming, I’m sure I will return to this show every once in a while for years to come. Though you could kind of feel the How To formula showing itself more and more this season — once again finding new weird underground communities like a group of vacuum cleaner enthusiasts or people that live in the woods without electricity — this formula still managed to produce unexpected results.
Luckily, the show didn’t overstay its welcome by making this its last season, and its wrestling with a past episode and the nature of its own internal truth in the penultimate “How To Watch Birds” added a nice layer to the show’s relationship with its documentary status. Overall, the show made me think about city living in a new way, and in particular New York, to the point where every time I visit now I’ll be on the lookout for some weird John Wilson-esque moment happening on every street corner.
Another show that made its third season its last in 2023, which honestly, is a shame. I feel like there was plenty more territory to explore in this show, considering most white folks like myself simply do not have a huge breadth of knowledge of rez life. Also, this show just did a great job of not only creating a rich world within its little corner of Oklahoma, but additionally setting up a great stable of characters, both in the main four kids as well as the great character actors that the show uses to establish the importance of the elders in native life, even if a lot of them are a bunch of goof balls.
Honestly, this probably would’ve placed even higher if Reservation Dogs didn’t stick so closely to the very FX aesthetic of doing a lot of stand-alone episodes, since the parts of this final season I liked the most were when all the various characters’ and their storylines were interwoven into one episode, like in the bittersweet finale (where we also got a Lily Gladstone cameo!). Farewell, shitasses.
The Bear, of course, was another FX show that did a lot of indulging of stand-alone episodes, but for some reason it never really bothered me. Probably because it just did these episodes in such a satisfying and unique way, from Marcus’s trip to Copenhagen to the family Christmas from hell presented in “Fishes”. Also, because there was this overarching story of the new restaurant opening up, it felt like there was still an endpoint and a narrative focus tying everything together.
I’m not sure if the second season was quite as electrifying as the first, which really threw you into the lion’s den of how stressful it is to work in the food service industry. But season two still had its share of high-stress situations, and the more multi-faceted tone of this season proved that this show is much more than a one-season wonder.
Sorry, I just didn’t have the will to spoil us all having the same top 2’s.
I more or less missed out on all of Succession for its run of being one of the most talked about (if not the most talked about) TV show of the last few years. However, I did manage to catch up with it last year, even if the finale had already aired by the time I was wrapping up watching the final season. Still, it didn’t really make this final season lose any of its power, as we see the inevitable transference of power happen between the Roy family and the show fulfills its destiny of being a tragedy, if not a very darkly funny one.
Really every actor on this show continued to embody these characters so well (with the nice addition of Alexander Skarsgard), to the point where it’ll be hard to imagine them playing anyone else. It feels like there isn’t really a must-watch TV drama that has materialized that can replace Succession as the big prestige-y drama of the moment, but considering it’s not really a comedy despite being a half-hour, my number 2 pick may do just fine.