Our critics supply their TV favorites of 2023.

Peg Aloi

I didn’t get to watch as much television this year as I wanted to, but still managed to see some great series and films. Here are some that stood out, including the final seasons of a number of fine series.

Matthew Rhys in Perry Mason. Photo: HBO

1. Perry Mason (HBO Max) An amazing reinvention of the classic 1950s series. Matthew Rhys stars as a deeply flawed but brilliant criminal defense attorney who returns to law after working as a private investigator for years. Partner Chris Chalk and assistant Juliet Rylance are part of a stunning cast in this deftly-written, artfully-rendered series. I’m massively disappointed this was canceled after its second season.
2. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix) Created by Mike Flanagan (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, The Midnight Club), this bold adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story about a wealthy patriarch (modeled perhaps on the horrible Sackler pharmaceutical empire) who is cursed to watch all of his offspring die is thoroughly modern and brutally dark and cynical. Flanagan’s frequent flyer cast of actors have never been better and the visuals are stunning. A truly debauched and delicious binge watch.
3. The Great (Hulu) Written by Tony McNamara (The Favourite and Poor Things), this brilliantly produced series stars Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult as the famed Russian rulers, Catherine and Peter the Great. From the witty, hilarious dialogue to the over-the-top performances accompanied by lush sets and stunning costumes, I can’t recommend this series highly enough. Now in its third season (a fourth is in doubt), be sure to enjoy some delicious food as you encounter Peter the Great’s endless gustatory obsessions.
4. Succession (HBO Max) The moment the heart-stopping series finale ends you’ll find yourself wanting to go back to the beginning and start all over again with this show and its impeccable acting, directing, and writing. The entire cast does astoundingly-good work and the writing is some of the best, thoroughly contemporary, capturing the essence of privileged humans behaving very badly indeed.
5. Rain Dogs (HBO) My favorite new series of 2023! A brilliantly funny and moving story of a working class woman (Daisy May Cooper) and her daughter trying to survive in London, and the wealthy long time friend (Jack Farthing) who drifts in and out of their lives. These people are imperfect and sometimes awful, but deeply lovable and the whirlwind of their lives is utterly captivating.
6. Dead Ringers (Prime) I loved this despite worrying it could never live up to the original Cronenberg film starring Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists, one a troubled drug addict and the other a malignant narcissist. Rachel Weisz inhabits the role with a virtuoso skill. Kudos to this reboot for bravely portraying the intensity of childbirth with all its attendant pain and horror.
7. I Hate Suzie/I Hate Suzie Too (HBO) The second season of this dazzling British series is made up of only three episodes (the first contained eight), but it is no less brilliant for its brevity. A B-level actress, Suzie Pickles (Billie Piper, who co-wrote with Lucy Prebble), has her life turned upside down when a sex video goes viral. She tries to rebuild her credibility by going on a celebrity competition dance show and the results are disastrous, despite being supported by her best friend (Leila Farzad) and husband (Lovesick’s Daniel Ings). Suzie’s journey is one of shame, anger, regret, courage, and indulgence, and I can’t recall the last time a TV series portrayed the complex dynamics of female friendship with such believability, humor, and depth.
8. A Murder at the End of the World (Hulu) A wealthy tech innovator (Clive Owen) invites people who’ve made strides in artificial intelligence to a small confab at his elaborate compound in rural Iceland. Young true crime writer and amateur sleuth Darby (Emma Corrin) is shocked when her former lover Bill (Harrison Dickinson) shows up — he had deserted her years earlier. When attendees start dying mysteriously, Emma is compelled to investigate and fight against the clock to save herself. Beautifully filmed and acted, this is a very bingeable thriller with some great twists and turns.
9. Sex Education (Netflix) The final season of the series was mostly satisfying. I was troubled by the under explained departure of Jean’s lover, who was a huge part of her story arc. The winding down of the lead character’s stories occasionally felt too neatly drawn in feel-good terms, but this sweet, emotionally-charged show still delivers great comedy and outrageous implausibility along with a healthy dose of sex advice.
10. Bodies (Netflix) I loved this time travel thriller with its multicultural casting and ingenious reconfiguring of central London across three centuries. Part sci-fi story, part crime procedural, this British series is cleverly-written, beautifully-designed, brilliantly-acted, and eminently watchable.

Sarah Osman

A few friends and I were discussing how the place for an actor to make their mark is no longer in film, but in television. We’re lucky enough to be living in TV’s Golden Age — which made it all so difficult to pick the best shows of 2023. Some shows will inevitably appear on every ‘Best TV of 2023’ list, so I decided to focus on some of the lesser-known efforts. These are the ones that wowed, shocked, and captivated me. May they do the same for you:

A scene from Koala Man. Photo: Hulu.

• Koala Man: The unhinged sounding premise: a suburban nitwit dons a koala mask and fights evil in a strange Australian town. And it is insane. But somehow Michael Cusack’s absurd animation makes the comedy work. The titular Koala Man takes on a trash-eating poppy as well as the local meth heads. It’s the surrealist details that make this show special, from kangaroos mugging people to efforts to ensure that clairvoyant Australians don’t tell Americans what will happen in the future.

• Jury Duty: Part of what makes Jury Duty work so well is Ronald Gladden, the sole member of the jury who doesn’t know the case he’s serving as a juror on is fake. Every other juror is an actor. Ronald’s sincerity is endearing; one especially heartwarming moment is when he shows one of his fellow jurors A Bug’s Life because he wants to show them that it’s okay to be different and think outside the box. Regardless of what is thrown at Ronald, he remains kind and determined to unite the jury. Unintentionally, he creates a makeshift family. While Gladden became the undeniable star, the performers who are in on the joke are hilarious as well, especially James Marsden, who plays an over-the-top narcissistic parody of himself.

• The Horror of Dolores Roach: Based on a podcast of the same name, The Horror of Dolores Roach is a modern take on the musical (and penny dreadful) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Instead of Sweeney, we have Dolores Roach, who has just spent 16 years in prison, where she learned how to give a really good massage. Upon release, she returns to a now-gentrified Washington Heights, where a stoner buddy of hers gives her a job as a masseuse in the back of his empanada shop. But when she kills a nosy landlord, she has to decide what to do with the body. If you’ve seen Sweeney Todd, you know that the corpse and the empanadas will be … intertwined. The Horror of Dolores Roach is a clever update on the classic tale, proving that much of the class injustice prevalent in Victorian England remains in operation today. Justina Machado, who plays the titular Dolores Roach, can shift from sympathetic to sinister in a matter of seconds. More proof that she is one of the most underrated actresses today.

• The Curse: Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s brilliant takedown of the White Savior Syndrome is bizarre, which is par for the course from this pair. While the series revolves around the titular curse (which turns out to be a TikTok challenge), it is really about delivering a sweeping statement about the evils of gentrification. The target: white liberal activists that no one asked for. Both Safdie and Fielder hold their own against Academy Award winner Emma Stone, who shines as the vile Whitney, a white savior who is hellbent on rescuing Espanola, New Mexico. This is a series that requires more than one watch — despite the amount of cringe it delivers — because of all the satiric details stuffed in each episode. I won’t reveal how The Curse ends, but it is among the most mind-blowing finales I’ve seen.

• The Other Two: What began as a comedy focused on the erratic adult siblings of Chase Dreams, a Justin Bieber-esque viral popstar, turned into one of the funniest satires of Hollywood ever. Wanda Sykes continues to steal scenes as Chase’s publicist. Matriarch Pat Dubek (Molly Shannon) becomes an Oprah-type figure, who can’t even go enjoy a dinner with her family at her local Applebee’s. The response: the family makes a fake Applebee’s for her (she knows it’s fake because of how good the steak is). One of the most fascinating turns was Cary’s (Drew Tarver) obsession with becoming an A-list actor, going so far as to drive eight hours straight to his high school reunion to brag about it. The Other Two was filled with plenty of moments I cringed at, but it’s the Dubek’s strange bond with one another that kept me coming back for more.

• Telemarketers: Several outrageous documentaries are released every year, but believe me when I say that Telemarketers may take the scam cake as the most memorable. What could loosely be described as an investigative takedown of call center scams, Telemarketers is also an in-depth psychological study of one of its leading men. The first episode introduces us to the wild call center they all worked in, which is described as “going to a cookout” every day. That’s a generous assessment: we see multiple employees snorting coke and hurling computer equipment. The call center’s antics are morbidly fascinating, but the real star is Patrick J. Pespas, who, along with documentarian Sam Lipman-Stern, attempts to uncover where the money these call centers are supposedly raising is going. Pespas is a hot mess who can’t conduct an interview to save his life. At the same time though, he is a genuinely sweet person who does care about protecting those who are being ripped off.

• The Glory: A modern South Korean take on The Count of Monte Cristo, The Glory is far from your typical cheeseball K-drama. A dark revenge tale, the series features a cold and calculating heroine, Moon Dong-eun (played by Song Hye-kyo), who is downright disturbing. Watching  a vengeful Moon slowly take down her high school bullies, one by one, is riveting. She concocts a more ingeniously evil downfall for each successive victim. And, unlike other revenge stories where you might feel some sympathy for those who are being crushed, you won’t for these bullies — they’re psychopaths through and through. The Glory is a slow burn, but revenge is at its most satisfying when it is served in slo-mo.

• I Think You Should Leave: The third season of I Think You Should Leave delivered more memorable sketches from Tim Robinson, who, thank God, was rejected from SNL or we wouldn’t have this magical sketch show. Topics of some of my favorite sketches include: winning a nude egg, 55 burgers, a driving crooner, realizing that monsters may exist on this earth and that’s a good thing because you don’t have to go to work tomorrow, shirt brothers, and a proposal spot that also doubles as a wrestling ring. If you have no idea what any of that means, then go watch the third season now. And Tim Robinson, I’m so glad you found a way to make money off of this.

• The Righteous Gemstones: How do the three Gemstone children try to run their parent’s evangelical church? It would best be epitomized in the scene where we watch them fight with their church employees, to the point they start to throw shoes at each other.  The mayhem is hilarious. The third season of Danny McBride’s lampoon of  institutional Christianity follows a similar formula to the first two (the Gemstones only come together when they are threatened by outside forces  but why change a winning strategy? Walton Goggins returned as Uncle Baby Billy, who pitches a series called “Uncle Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers” (try saying that three times fast); he remains the not-so-secret star of the series.

• Schmigadoon! I did not expect there to be a second season of Schmigadoon! The spoof of ’40s and ’50s musicals had wrapped up its first season as perfectly as the material it parodied. But, like most musical theater geeks, I rejoiced at the show’s return, this time parodying the “dark” musicals of the ’60s and ’70s like Chicago, Cabaret, and Sweeney Todd. Schimgadoon is now known as Schimcacago: the opening number is a sarconic homage to Pippin (complete with the weird white faces). It was fun seeing all of the actors from season one return in new roles, but newcomer Titus Burgess stole the show as “the narrator,” who makes snide comments via song. Hopefully, we’ll get a season three, which will lambaste the spectacles of the ’80s.

Allen Michie

Tom Jones (BBC)

Solly McLeod stars as Tom, alongside Sophie Wilde as Sophia, in the BBC’s Tom Jones. Photo: PBS Masterpiece

There was much left out from Henry Fielding’s long but brilliant eighteenth-century novel, but the BBC scored by unlocking its endless closets of costumes and props — and by taking a fresh approach to casting. The chemistry of this Tom and his beloved Sophia sizzled right through the screen.