Ranking Every TV Show of 2023: #s 80-66

We’re ranking every TV show that we watched in 2023. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

80. The Continental (Peacock, Season 1). I get the idea. The John Wick universe is appealing in part for its intricate mythology, so it’s theoretically possible to derive further entertainment from its lore, even without the grounding presence of Keanu Reeves. The problem with The Continental is that, aside from Mel Gibson’s shameless scenery-chewing, nothing about it is remotely memorable. Its cast feels second-rate, its plotting is perfunctory, and its action, while occasionally kinetic, never comes close to approaching even a third-tier set piece from the Wick flicks. Those movies are about one man’s desperate attempts to fight back against the High Table—the invisible institution that inflexibly dominates his world and restricts his autonomy. Yet The Continental feels like a servant of the Table itself: a piece of corporate property, fulfilling its duty without deviating from its superiors’ instructions. It isn’t a revolutionary, it’s a slave.

79. The Mandalorian (Disney, Season 3; 2020 rank: 37 of 124). If there’s one global complaint I have about television in 2023, it’s that there’s just too much forgettable franchise fare. Secret Invasion, Percy Jackson, Loki, The Wheel of Time—none of this stuff is bad, exactly, but it all exists as an elaborate form of fan service, regurgitating IP rather than telling new and interesting stories. The third season of The Mandalorian has some spiffy sets and cool creatures, plus one (1) episode that verges on memorable. (Look, it’s Lizzo!) But for the most part, it’s just more stuff—more tail-chasing mythology, more cute shots of Baby Yoda, more easter eggs for Star Wars nerds, more banal action scenes involving helmeted warriors who randomly fire laser blasts at one another. The creative promise of the galaxy far, far away is that it holds infinite possibility for new adventures. Yet right now, this show is on autopilot.

78. Ahsoka (Disney, Season 1). Sorry, what was I saying about tediously manufactured IP? There are things to like about Ahsoka: It actually sports some half-decent action (yay, lightsabers!), and… well, actually, that’s about it? Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are both talented actors, so it’s frustrating that they’re given so little flexibility here, instead forced to belch out intergalactic mumbo-jumbo without receiving the freedom to enjoy themselves. I will keep watching Ahsoka because watching shows like Ahsoka is what I do (in my defense, I also watch a lot of shows unlike Ahsoka), but it’d be nice for the series to give me a reason beyond, “Hey, maybe something interesting will happen next season.” This is not the way.

77. The Righteous Gemstones (HBO, Season 3; last year: 98 of 110). Sorry, I still can’t get there.

76. The Witcher (Netflix, Season 3; 2021 rank: 43 of 108). What is going on with this show? That isn’t just a literal question, though I never come close to comprehending the series’ byzantine narrative. It’s also a thematic and aesthetic one. Is there any point to this? And if there isn’t, shouldn’t it at least look cooler? The Witcher still flashes some impressively grotesque creatures, and Henry Cavill and Anya Chalotra have developed a natural chemistry (though separating Cavill and Freya Allan was ill-advised). But the series has grown so preoccupied with its dense mythology, it’s neglected the sense of spirited fun that animated it in the first place. “Henry Cavill slays monsters and also there’s lots of hot sex” is a durable premise; can we just have more of that?

75. Reacher (Amazon, Season 2; last year: 82). Jack Reacher is the kind of man who just gets shit done, and the series that bears his name is designed to mirror his brute-force talents. This is an incredibly functional show, with blunt characters, efficient set pieces, and no interesting ideas. That’s fine, but Reacher’s action isn’t crisp or exciting enough to compensate for its blockheaded writing. Sure, it makes good use of Alan Ritchson’s colossal size, and it’s invariably satisfying to watch good guys outmaneuver bad guys, especially when the latter are led by an oily Robert Patrick. But over eight episodes, the show’s pattern—Reacher uncovers a mysterious clue, gets cornered, then bashes in a few henchmen’s heads—grows repetitive, lacking the stylish zip needed to distinguish itself. There are only so many interesting ways to watch some anonymous sap get punched in the face.

74. The Consultant (Amazon, Season 1). So here’s something of a relief: This show is bizarre. It’s set at a videogame company whose CEO kills himself, and then Christoph Waltz shows up as a bureaucrat who’s scared to climb stairs but who somehow installs himself as the head of the corporation and also there’s surveillance footage of him previously fucking the old boss in the mouth and whaaa? Nothing about The Consultant is remotely persuasive: not its insight into workplace drudgery, not its satire of dog-eat-dog capitalism, not its suggestion of videogames’ violent appeal, and certainly not its bonkers story. Still, it’s at least different. Waltz is funny even when he’s scary, Brittany O’Grady is appealing, and there’s an overlying absurdity that keeps you on your toes. But then there’s a subplot about stealing an elephant and letting it rampage through the Los Angeles streets and like, sorry, but I need a little realism to go with all the lunacy, OK?

73. Snowfall (FX, Season 6; last year: 103). The knowledge that Snowfall was entering its final season (at last!) allowed its writers to turn up the heat, increasing the personal stakes rather than just running in dramatic place. Still, even with a newfound sense of consequences—which mostly manifest in terms of key characters dying—it can’t shake the feeling of simply being an inferior version of Breaking Bad. There’s slight poignancy in Damson Idris’ drug lord fulfilling his destiny as a greedy villain (and forfeiting his soul in the process), and it’s good to see Black characters centered in this kind of quasi-prestige crime saga. But Snowfall never figured out its desired balance of gritty realism and operatic storytelling. It wanted to both get you high and bring you down; it ended up doing neither.

72. Painkiller (Netflix, Season 1). Writing about Dopesick two years ago, I described it as “defiantly unsubtle.” Well, Painkiller makes it look like a Kelly Reichardt film. The rage on display is genuine, of course, and most of the cast—including Uzo Aduba as a crusading investigator and West Duchovny as an ambitious Purdue pusher who develops a nibble of a conscience—is steady. (Matthew Broderick’s Richard Sackler is rather less persuasive.) But as someone who’s already been primed to despise the Sackler family as a ruinous and predatory institution, I needed more from this series than just white-hot anger. It doesn’t help that we’ve seen all of this before: the noble everyman (Taylor Kitsch) who develops a crippling opioid addiction, the avaricious big-pharma reps who skirt the rules (although, hello Dina Shihabi), the rugged lawyers who get stonewalled by red tape. Painkiller is engrossing by pure virtue of its subject matter, but it never hooks into your bloodstream.

71. Extrapolations (Apple, Season 1).
70. The Morning Show (Apple, Season 3; 2021 rank: 104).
It’s kismet that these two Apple productions landed next to each other, because they’re both very flawed, very watchable shows that desperately want to be About Something. Extrapolations takes as its focus no less than the imminent destruction of the human race—specifically vis-à-vis climate change. That’s grave stuff, but it’s difficult to take this anthology seriously when it’s so (ahem) overheated, with ludicrous subplots and didactic finger-wagging. That said, it’s entertaining on the whole, with an indecently talented cast (Daveed Diggs, Edward Norton, Meryl Streep, just to name a few) and individual episodes that are engaging if not quite provocative. Any show where a sniveling Matthew Rhys gets eaten by a walrus can’t be all bad.

The Morning Show is somehow even more strenuous in its moralism—not least because it inexplicably attempts to turn a show about fatuous TV anchors into a referendum on the causes and consequences of January 6. (It’s also yet another 2023 series that squanders Jon Hamm.) But despite The Morning Show’s off-key screeching, there are at least interesting ideas at play here: about the value of the fourth estate in the disinformation age, about workplaces that prize institutional survival over individual loyalty, about the voracious egos of tech billionaires who’re convinced they’re the only ones who can save the world. It isn’t strictly speaking a good show, but it’s rarely boring, and its willingness to pivot into unexplored areas is a sign of courage, if not intelligence.

69. I’m a Virgo (Amazon, Season 1). In terms of raw ambition, I’m a Virgo is a monumental achievement. It takes place in a dystopian future (I think?), and its central character is a 13-foot-tall Black man who’s spent his entire life sheltered from the world (think Luke Cage by way of Dogtooth), and also Walton Goggins is a corporate superhero? There’s a lot going on, and Boots Riley—the polemicist who previously made Sorry to Bother You—struggles to streamline his boisterous ideas into a coherent narrative. That’s arguably in keeping with the series’ overall bigness, but I’m a Virgo’s indiscipline diminishes the clarity of its message, drowning its themes in hectic invention. For a show about a giant, it’s fitting that its reach vastly exceeds its grasp.

68. Kaleidoscope (Netflix, Season 1). The gimmick of Kaleidoscope is so simple, it’s hard to believe nobody had ever thought of it before: Each episode (with the exception of the last) is delivered to viewers in random order, scrambling the audience experience and defying conventional notions of how TV is meant to be consumed. It’s a half-clever idea that is too transfixed by its own half-cleverness, warping the show into a puzzle whose pieces can never lock into place. Still, it’s at least new, and the heist material that surrounds it (featuring Giancarlo Esposito as the ringleader) is, if not especially original, durably suspenseful. Whether Kaleidoscope heralds a revolution in how streamers deliver their #content remains to be seen (I have my doubts), but for now, it suffices as a creative curio.

67. White House Plumbers (HBO, Season 1). Just as Painkiller suffered by following Dopesick, White House Plumbers has the misfortune to come on the heels of Gaslit, which chronicled the bungling exploits of the Watergate cover-up just last year. This new miniseries, which stars Woody Harrelson as Howard Hunt and Justin Theroux as Gordon Liddy, isn’t exclusively about the DNC break-in, instead following Nixon’s bag men from one foolhardy disaster to the next. But while the actors are solid and the subject matter is disturbingly resonant, it’s hard not to perceive White House Plumbers as a mere echo—not just of Gaslit, but of superior docudramas that traffic in idiocy and malfeasance. The show is interesting almost by default. This stuff really happened! it exclaims in amazement. Good thing nothing like it will ever happen again.

66. Lucky Hank (AMC, Season 1). I’ll concede that my expectations for this show were unduly high, given that Bob Odenkirk’s prior collaboration with AMC concluded with one of the great seasons in television history—the one that topped this very list last year. But once you recognize that Lucky Hank has no interest in approaching the heights reached by Better Call Saul, you realize that the show—about an English professor at a small liberal-arts college chafing against the mundanity of his dead-end Pennsylvania town (also, he has daddy issues)—mostly works on its own terms. It’s the terms themselves that are problematic. Odenkirk, a natural charmer, deserves credit for portraying such an unlikable asshole, and the satire feels suitably steeped in academic minutiae (much like The Chair from a few years back). But if Lucky Hank feels true to its characters, it achieves that sensation mostly by being unpleasant. It might receive a passing grade if it weren’t so insistent on flunking itself.

Coming tomorrow: monsters, pornographers, thieves, and aristocrats.