We’re ranking every TV show that we watched in 2023. If you missed yesterday’s initial installments, you can find them at the following links:
65. Lupin (Netflix, Season 3; 2021 rank: 63 of 108). Shows about thieves are automatically appealing, and Lupin still sports an engaging lead performance from Omar Sy. But while the premise of a master of disguise constantly thwarting his pursuers would seem well-suited for a sprawling TV series (just who will he pretend to be next??), Lupin shows signs of strain. This new season’s insistence on retconning its backstory—our heroic burglar was once sheltered by a manipulative crime lord, and also turns out his mother is still alive!—suggests a gimmick that’s running out of ways to reinvent itself, and whose time-hopping has grown stale. Many of the set pieces remain satisfying, and Sy’s charisma is boundless. But even his character would struggle to break through the show’s pervasive formula.
64. Invincible (Amazon, Season 2; 2021 rank; 76). As unnecessary second seasons go, Invincible is admirably small-scale, running just four episodes. Its animation remains spiffy, and its exploration of how a superhero attempts to balance professional responsibilities with personal desires is durable, if far from original. Still, the flighty action lacks oomph, and the scope is too broad to dig into the characters; oddly enough, Invincible’s compressed length hamstrings it, preventing it from receiving the necessary time to breathe. The result is an oddity: a comic-book show that looks and sounds unique, but which struggles to truly differentiate itself from its costumed brethren. Its titular hero may travel to distant planets for new adventures, but his namesake is still trying to find itself.
63. The Afterparty (Apple, Season 2; last year: 48 of 110). How far can a great concept carry you? The basic structure of The Afterparty—a murder mystery in which each episode acquires an altogether different tone tailored to the particular suspect under the detective’s microscope—is fairly brilliant. So it’s no surprise that Season 2 basically repeats itself, bringing back a few regulars (Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, Zoë Chao) but otherwise investigating a new killing with new suspects. Yet while the formula is still reliably versatile—the best installments include a Wes Anderson-inspired romp centering on Anna Konkle and a noirish interlude featuring Paul Walter Hauser—the broader narrative it serves is largely banal, with flat characters and a tedious story. Perhaps next season, The Afterparty will ape yet another kind of genre: the rare whodunit that’s actually interesting.
62. Platonic (Apple, Season 1). Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are both pleasant actors, and when Platonic simply relaxes and allows us to spend time in their shared company, it’s mostly delightful. What rankles about the show—aside from its “Everything magically worked out great!” finale—is its obligation to complicate their friendship with forced contrivances and canned conflicts. It’s not as though Platonic should have just avoided tension altogether because then it would have been drained of interest, but there’s something strained about the series’ herky-jerky plotting. That’s frustrating, because when Rogen and Byrne are given the freedom to just play off one another, they both do strong work, honing a relationship that’s realistic in its asymmetry and complexity. This is a watchable show—just not one you’d ever imagine falling in love with.
61. The Curse (Showtime, Season 1). Judging things quantitatively—i.e., in terms of the percentage of time I spent seething at the screen—The Curse probably belongs 15-20 spots lower on this list. Cringe comedy is rarely my thing, and this series—starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder as a married couple whose white guilt inspires them to reinvigorate a Native American community with eco-friendly homes and workspaces, all while making an HGTV show documenting their gentrifying efforts—is regularly excruciating. But it sports an undeniable personality, along with performances (including Benny Safdie as an amoral producer) that are disturbingly attuned to the characters’ neuroses. It’s difficult to recommend The Curse, given that it’s such an uncomfortable experience. But it is an experience.
60. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple, Season 1). On one hand, the ongoing monster-verse from Legendary Entertainment, which will deliver another theatrical feature this spring (the oddly titled Godzilla x Kong), is a shameless recycling of existing IP designed to exploit viewers’ affection for their favorite giant reptiles and primates. On the other hand, the prospect of a TV show involving an endless supply of enormous monsters (“titans” in the series’ parlance) is kind of irresistible. Monarch never comes close to approximating the sublimity of the best creature features (such as Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong), but it does unfold with a high-floor competence that minimizes its mercenary nature. The human characters aren’t exactly three-dimensional, but they aren’t pure fodder either (Wyatt and Kurt Russell playing the same character in different time periods is a stroke of genius), and the show at least tries to combine robust CGI mayhem with sincere melodrama. Besides, “Monarch: Legacy of People” hardly has the same ring to it.
59. Minx (Starz, Season 2; last year: 59). The overarching theme of Season 2 of Minx carries a faintly generic whiff of “nothing fails like success”; it finds Ophelia Lovibond’s women’s-lib activist sacrificing her artistic principles in order to achieve greater circulation, while Jake Johnson’s scrappy publisher loses creative control of the magazine he once spearheaded. But it could have been “nothing fails like failure,” given that Max shelved the series before Starz rescued it from streaming oblivion. (Naturally, it’s now been cancelled yet again.) I was happy to return to its hormone-fueled universe, even if Minx is often too preoccupied with staging faux celebrity cameos (it’s Carl Sagan! it’s Joan Didion!) when it should be centering its fictional leads. Yet even if Minx is a little overstuffed, it still maintains a welcome sense of place and purpose, combining quippy comedy with genuine ideas. It may be uneven and unsure of itself, but it can also be sexy and smart—the kind of show you turn to for the raunch, then stick around to read the articles.
58. Scavengers Reign (Max, Season 1). Animation tends to be a child’s playground, with artists creating cartoons that are soothing and life-affirming. But the medium is one of infinite possibility, bound only by the limits of a storyteller’s imagination. Scavengers Reign, about a group of scattered survivors marooned on a distant planet, is memorable not so much for its story (which is fairly pedestrian) as for its extraordinary sense of invention, envisioning an environment of exotic flora and fauna that are both beautiful and grotesque. Parts of the series are, frankly, fucking gross, with squirmy sights and squelching sounds. But even its horrors are notable for their newness, and some of the animators’ fabrications—a predator that clones its prey before burying it alive; a parasitic organism that shelters within its host’s chest cavity—are remarkable in their innovation. This isn’t always an enjoyable show (its narrative can grow quite dark), but it delivers on its promise of taking you to a faraway world.
57. The Gilded Age (HBO, Season 2; last year: 40). Julian Fellowes has always prioritized surfaces over depth, and that’s what makes The Gilded Age such an ideal project for him. In terms of pure aesthetics, this is among my favorite shows on TV, with magnificent costumes, opulent production design, and an overall sense of visual splendor. And yet, its extreme obviousness—its angelic (or demonic) figures, its predictable plotting, its angsty need to please—is wearing a little thin. It doesn’t help that its scope has grown increasingly unwieldy, with several absurd subplots designed to accommodate its sprawling, not entirely excellent cast. That said, the marriage between Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector remains gratifying for its loyalty and (relative) nuance, and a few other characters threaten to acquire dimensionality. I wish it were a bit more subtle, but then, railroad barons were never known for their restraint.
56. The Night Agent (Netflix, Season 1). In a way, this series from Shawn Ryan (The Shield) isn’t all that different from Reacher; it plods forward relentlessly, and it’s functional above all else. But there’s a bit more energy on display here—not so much in the twisty, 24-esque plotting, but in the urgency of the set pieces and the mystery. The incomprehensible narrative is more playful than impenetrable, and there’s a propulsive momentum that helps compensate for the somewhat low-wattage cast (excluding Hong Chau and her fabulous wig). I won’t pretend that The Night Agent is an especially intelligent show, but it’s very smart about how dumb it is.
55. Ted Lasso (Apple, Season 3; 2021 rank: 25). Can I just pass? Look, Ted Lasso was never meant to dominate The Discourse; it was just supposed to be a nice little series about a nice guy doing nice things in an industry where niceness is verboten. But then it became a sensation, and then it became a punching bag, and now I’m compelled to tell everyone to take a deep breath and remind you all that the third season of Ted Lasso is fine. Well, actually, very little of it is individually fine; it’s more that it averages out to fine, because some subplots are delightful and others are dreadful. There are plentiful moments where the show delivers on its promise to supply genuine, heartwarming sweetness; there are roughly an equal number of moments where that ostensible sweetness curdles into sap. It may not be a satisfying answer, but one of the annoying things about soccer is that quite frequently, the game ends in a tie.
54. Great Expectations (FX on Hulu, Season 1). Did we need another adaptation of a Dickens classic? Surely not. But TV doesn’t need anything, and this update of Great Expectations justifies its existence through its curious blend of beauty and roughness. The period setting naturally affords for some ravishing sets and scenery, but the production feels caked in mud, emphasizing the intensity of Dickens’ storytelling along with the clarity of his prose. Olivia Colman is obviously the headliner as Miss Havisham, but the real find is Ashley Thomas as Jaggers, the lawyer who steamrolls through London with bristling lethality. The show also introduces a racial dimension (Estella is now Black) that doesn’t so much modernize the material as complicate it, lending tendrils of intrigue to a familiar classic. That this Great Expectations concludes with a cleansing inferno is disappointing, but it doesn’t invalidate the eye-catching messiness that precedes it.
53. Schmigadoon! (Apple Season 2; 2021 rank: 45). Yay, a musical! There are simply too few song-and-dance productions on TV these days (I still miss Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, despite its imperfections), and Schmigadoon! does its best to fill that void. Granted, “its best” often isn’t as good as I’d like; some of the numbers here lack snap and imagination, and the music tends to be more serviceable than exhilarating. Still, conceptually speaking, the series is a home run, and it smartly tweaks its formula for its second, shifting from buoyant cornpone to a seedier setting that pays homage to classics like Sweeney Todd and Chicago. And while it still struggles to blend its ground-bound character work with its free-floating songs, it remains a noble experiment—one worthy of applause, if not quite a standing ovation.
52. Starstruck (Max, Season 3; last year: 77). The best scene in the third (and presumably last) season of Starstruck is the first: a smoothly edited montage that displays a happy relationship gradually disintegrating into an inevitable breakup. It’s beautifully done, but it also reveals the difficulty of this series, which insists on keeping its putative lovers apart in order to sustain dramatic tension. That’s a familiar problem for TV—there’s a reason the happy marriage on Friday Night Lights still feels so richly rewarding and uncommon, all these years later—but Starstruck navigates it fairly well, avoiding formulaic contrivances in favor of more realistic complications. It also continues to feature a delightful supporting cast, most notably during a sojourn at a remote cabin where the guests play a hilarious game of Werewolf. And it ends with what feels like an actual ending. In an era where so many streaming services shunt their #content into the netherworld in exchange for tax write-offs, it’s nice to see a show say goodbye on its own terms.
51. Silo (Apple, Season 1). As a piece of world-building, Silo—set in a (surprise!) dystopian future where all of society has crowded into a vertiginous bunker, as the world’s air has grown too contaminated to breathe—isn’t especially persuasive. But as a slow-burn thriller, it’s pretty good, with a sturdy lead performance from Rebecca Ferguson and a slowly accumulating sense of anxiety. I generally chafe against series that drag out their central mystery, but Silo is well-paced, building to a legitimate catharsis even if its pieces don’t always fit together. More importantly, the show just feels clammy and oppressive, despite its lack of verisimilitude. Its subjugated residents may be terrified of the outside air, but this thing has plenty of atmosphere.
Coming later today: cannibals, hijackers, vampires, and teenagers.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.