Ranking Every TV Show of 2023: #s 30-21

We’re continuing to rank every TV show we watched in 2023. For prior pieces in this exhaustive, exhausting series, check out the following links:

#s 94-81
#s 80-66
#s 65-51
#s 50-41
#s 40-31

30. Dead Ringers (Amazon, Season 1). The cinema of David Cronenberg isn’t for everyone; sometimes, it isn’t for me. (Much as I adored his mid-aughts one-two punch of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, I’ve chafed against his more recent films, including Crimes of the Future.) It certainly wouldn’t seem fit for adaptation into a TV series, not least when you’re talking about one of his chilliest and most disturbing works. And yet, this new Dead Ringers is oddly mesmerizing, with moments of haunting beauty alongside all of the predictable blood and pain and venality. Some of that is thanks to the eerie production design; some of it is thanks to the creepy, enigmatic plotting. But most of it is thanks to Rachel Weisz, who plays the role(s) of twin obstetricians with unnerving steel and buried mania. “I can get her for you,” one of Weisz’s brilliant sisters says to the other in the first episode, in a line whose sinister implications will rattle around in your brain for some time. It’s a performance both alluring and upsetting—one that gives new meaning to the concept of double trouble.

29. Cunk on Earth (Netflix, Season 1). It’s funny. That’s really the extent of my analysis of Cunk on Earth, a mock BBC program (created by Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker) in which a clueless journalist charts the entire progress of human history while also obtusely interviewing various scholars. Is the show insightful about the barbarous nature of so-called civilization? Eh, maybe. Is it hysterical? Decidedly. Diane Morgan’s performance is so winningly stupid, it’s almost tender, and her narration is hilarious in its withering honesty. “Having conquered numbers,” she says in the first episode after discussing mathematics, “humankind moved on to something even more boring by inventing writing.” How dare she.

28. Billions (Showtime, Season 7; last year: 70 of 110). The very last episode of Billions—the 84th installment of this hour-long series that spanned seven seasons and (thanks to a COVID interruption) eight years—is a gigantic letdown, one that replaces the show’s complexity and unpredictability with gooey happiness and comeuppance. That’s a bummer, but it shouldn’t unduly detract from what’s otherwise a deeply entertaining final season. Part of it is thanks to a canny update in focus; abandoning the moronic “Will New York host the Olympics??” runner from Season 6, the show instead delves into a presidential race with tangible stakes. But Billions has always worked best on a micro level as a pure pleasure dispensary: the pithy dialogue, the shameless references, the even more shameless cameos that somehow make contextual sense. (Bringing back Damian Lewis helps too.) The series may have gone bankrupt in the end, but for most of its run, it kept the profit machine whirring.

27. Beef (Netflix, Season 1). This show is… a lot. It’s got road rage and immigrant families and the cathartic thrills of sex and violence and the financial pressure of surviving in the gig economy and the humiliation of sucking up to your obnoxious boss, and it’s all kind of exhausting. But it’s also awfully entertaining, with a relentless momentum that pulls you into its vortex of anger and pride and desperation. Ali Wong and Steven Yeun are both electric, in part for how they lean into their characters’ nastiness without depriving them of their humanity. As a melodrama, Beef isn’t wholly persuasive, but as a piece of propulsive pop art, it’s somehow self-sustaining—propelling itself forward with heedless energy, never once stopping to tap the brakes.

26. Blindspotting (Starz, Season 2; 2021 rank: 22 of 108). Blindspotting is a show about the prison industrial complex, about systemic racism and police brutality, about class oppression and gentrification and generational poverty. So naturally, it devotes an entire episode to a fantastical western in which a child imagines his parents as gun-slinging heroes. That might sound frivolous, but the key to this series is how it delivers its big ideas in a shiny package. It doesn’t even “smuggle” its themes, because they’re right there on the surface; it just conveys them with creativity and vitality. Fiercely political and boisterously imaginative, Blindspotting puts the lie to the notion that polemics and entertainment can’t go hand in hand.

25. Black Mirror (Netflix, Season 6; 2019 rank: 56 of 101). We have long since passed the point when new episodes of Black Mirror are a cultural event, or even a trenchant commentary on our digital age. (Silicon Valley dipshit-in-chief Elon Musk bragged that he installed a microchip in a person’s brain literally two days ago; real life is now a satire.) What’s interesting is that the series’ diminished relevance has afforded it the freedom to just relax and deliver chilling dystopian nightmares that are as noteworthy for their intensity and intelligence as their purported insight into How We Live Now. That said, it’s impressive that Black Mirror manages to bite the hand that feeds it, with a pair of episodes which envision Netflix as an unholy algorithmic monster. And while every anthology series has its peaks and valleys, in pure quantitative terms, Season 6 is 60% excellent, with three installments—the one with the recursive streaming show starring Salma Hayek, the one where Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett have a workplace tiff in outer space, and the one where a demon wears an ice-cream-white ’70s fur—that are invigorating for reasons beyond their technological allegory. Black Mirror no longer makes me queasy about our future, but it makes me jazzed for the present.

24. Daisy Jones and the Six (Amazon, Season 1). “Let’s make Almost Famous but as a 10-hour TV series” isn’t exactly the sexiest of pitches. But even if Daisy Jones and the Six can feel generic in both structure and style, it’s just too well-made and enjoyable to dismiss as secondhand pastiche. Its music may not be electrifying, but it’s appealing and hummable, and the sequences of artistic creation—such as when a producer pretends one singer’s mic isn’t working to induce him to cozy up to his band mate—are irresistible. Beyond that, the show’s melodrama is just the right touch of overheated, with powerful performances from Riley Keough and Sam Claflin that transcend their archetypes. (Also, hello Suki Waterhouse.) It’s hardly destined for the rock-and-roll Hall of Fame, but in chronicling the highs and lows of a fictionalized Fleetwood Mac, Daisy Jones and the Six delivers easy listening from first track to last.

23. A Murder at the End of the World (FX on Hulu, Season 1). I’m generally resistant to litmus tests, but I do tend to think that a key stress point for whodunits is whether they’re watchable independent from the question of identifying the killer. A Murder at the End of the World mostly passes that test. Its themes—the degradation of communication in the social-media age, the existential threat of artificial intelligence, the “I alone can fix it” attitude of tech bros in the face of climate change—are thought-provoking beyond their surface level. And its mystery—about, well, a murder at the end of the world, specifically at a swanky underground compound in Iceland—is as absorbing for its disturbed and disturbing characters as for its ultimate resolution (which happens to be pretty neat). Emma Corrin’s sympathetic performance showcases newfound range, while Clive Owen is casually perfect as the supercilious host and prime suspect. The result is a series that lingers in your mind even after the bodies hit the floor and the guilty have been exposed, like a bone-deep chill that never seems to thaw.

22. Warrior (Max, Season 3). For a series that began as a shock-and-awe campaign of Cinemax-fueled sex and violence, it’s been gratifying to watch Warrior evolve into a flesh-and-blood TV show, with richly drawn characters and thorny plotting. To be fair, that maturation occurred during Season 2, when I still wasn’t watching (because I lacked access to Cinemax). But catching up on the entire series this year, I was struck by the boldness of its storytelling, which continues in its third season. The writing remains exaggerated, but that’s in keeping with an operatic show where every decision has life-or-death consequences. Beyond that, the martial-arts action still rips, and it’s complemented by sumptuous accoutrements (please meet Olivia Cheng and her dresses). Warrior takes its characters and their dilemmas seriously, but that never prevents it from being an absolute blast.

21. Reservation Dogs (FX on Hulu, Season 3; last year: 52). It took three seasons, but I finally warmed to this critically beloved series in its final bow. Its gentleness is still a tad slack for my taste, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai isn’t my favorite performer. But the series cultivated an abiding warmth—a sense of affection for all of its characters, both young and old—that was powerful in its sincerity, even as it refused to curdle into schmaltz. Season 3 is more structurally daring than its predecessors, with Ocean’s Eleven-tinged heists and Dazed and Confused-style flashbacks and mythological appearances. Hell, when you can get Ethan Hawke to show up for a single episode and deliver a gut-punch, you’ve achieved some sort of sublimity. Reservation Dogs wasn’t the perfect series others have acclaimed it as, but it did ultimately acquire a certain grace—a confidence that it was telling its own story at its own speed in its own way, like a folktale destined to be repeated around the campfire for generations.

Coming tomorrow: cops, cooks, assassins, and comedians.