The Best TV Shows of 2023

And at long last, here we are. 2023 may have been a down year for TV overall, but its relative blahness shouldn’t influence perceptions of the year’s best shows, which were uniformly exceptional. Our countdown of every series of the year concludes below, but if you missed the prior episodes, consult the following links:

#s 94-81
#s 80-66
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#s 20-11

10. Barry (HBO, Season 4; last year: 12 of 110). Barry was always enjoyable in part for how deftly it blended its madcap comedy with the emptiness eating away at its titular assassin’s soul. So as the show continued to lean harder into its darker impulses, it was fair to question if it was losing that delicate balance. But Bill Hader’s vision for this entrancing, disturbing show has always been personal—with little interest in appealing to fans or playing it safe. The final season hardly skimps on quirky entertainment; there are shootouts and prison breaks and Sian Heder cameos and organized-crime meetings at Dave & Buster’s. But its portrait of all-consuming selfishness—personified not just by Hader but by a wonderful Sarah Goldberg—is awfully bleak, and Barry commits to it with unapologetic zeal as well as formal audacity. Remember, this started out as a one-joke show about a hit man trying to become an actor. By the time it ended, no one was laughing.

9. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon, Season 5; last year: 11). Following some slight creative wheel-spinning in Season 4, Amy Sherman-Palladino received something of a blessing upon learning that Amazon would only give the show one last season. That sense of finality allows her to approach this last go-round with a combination of focus and sprawl, resolving key character beats while also expanding the story decades into the future. It’s an ambitious approach that yields substantial and varied rewards: the opening flash-forwards, the prison visits, the roast. Yet The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has always been most enjoyable for two reasons: its stupendous period detail (most notably in the magnificently colorful costumes), and the oil-and-water friendship between Rachel Brosnahan’s dazzling comedienne and Alex Borstein’s frumpy manager. Their rich, ever-shifting partnership forms the backbone of this final season, which continues to draw on its usual patterns—the rapid-fire jokes, the personal and professional embarrassments, the fluid camera moves—while also investing them with a certain permanence. I’ve heard rumblings that this series was guilty of repeating itself, but Mrs. Maisel’s constancy was its strength: always gorgeous, frequently touching, and consistently funny.

8. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix, Season 1). The fit between Mike Flanagan and Edgar Allan Poe is obvious, given that both artists apply their rigorous craftsmanship in order to terrify their audience. But the premise of “Flanagan does Poe” disserves the complexity of this series, which is as narratively bold as it is visually opulent. In telling a story of degradation—of power achieved and squandered, of insatiable greed causing chaos—Flanagan performs a feat of elevation, heightening his characters’ sinful, ghastly behavior with his customary showmanship. As a purveyor of horror, he remains gifted at constructing atmospheres of seething dread, while typically limiting himself to one or two ferocious jump scares per hour (one of which, in the sixth episode, haunts me still). Yet in weaving Poe’s most familiar works into a unified demonic tapestry, Flanagan has also capitalized on the promise of television, tying each episode not just to a specific story but also to a particular member of his haunted household. The entire cast is good—Bruce Greenwood excels as the embattled patriarch, while Carla Gugino enjoys herself as, well, you’ll see—but The Fall of the House of Usher exceeds the sum of its appealingly nasty parts. It is full of style and color and life, even when it’s busy scaring you to death.

7. The Great (Hulu, Season 3; 2021 rank: 2 of 108). The Great hardly needed to reinvent itself; its initial mix of historical costume drama and ribald sex comedy was so immediately watchable, it could have just stayed in that vein indefinitely. But this has always been a deceptively nervy show, and in its third (and, sadly, final) season, it slyly updates its formula without sacrificing the ample pleasures that have always made it so enjoyable. I’m not just speaking of a certain plot point that dramatically reshapes the entire series; I’m also referring to its thematic focus, which expands from a singularly twisted romance and grows to enfold the very concept of society itself. Yet the bristling political insights of this show are never didactic. How could they be, when Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult imbue its central pairing with such demented verve and lacerating humor? The Great is so satisfying—insightful and uproarious, wild and tender, intelligent and profane—that its cancellation is both a bitter pill and a sober reminder. Even the grandest empires weren’t built to last.

6. Poker Face (Peacock, Season 1). I’ve never seen Columbo, so I can’t speak to how faithfully Poker Face imitates one of the 20th century’s most beloved procedurals. What I can say is that this new series from Rian Johnson is spell-binding, most obviously for a structural gambit—each episode begins with a murder, then rewinds to reveal Natasha Lyonne piecing the clues together—that’s hardly novel but which feels revelatory in our present moment. Still, Poker Face is far more than a clever gimmick; it’s also a fiendishly smart series overall, with snappy dialogue, elegant plotting, and an exhilarating sense of possibility. Adopting a case-of-the-week approach, each episode brings with it new opportunities: new guest stars (Chloë Sevigny! Ellen Barkin!), new locations, new mysteries, new feats of deduction. The obligation of approaching every installment with such a fearsome level of innovation would seem daunting, but when it comes to gambling, Johnson has long since proved there’s no point betting against him.

5. Sex Education (Netflix, Season 4; 2021 rank: 6). Watching TV is fundamentally a passive activity, but every so often, an alchemical process takes place wherein I feel like I become part of a show. Not literally, of course; much as I admire Pleasantville, I don’t pretend to be living in it. But I connect to the characters and the story in a way that feels profoundly, absurdly personal. I don’t remember precisely when that occurred with Sex Education—probably midway through Season 2—but it remained in force throughout its final season, which is so boisterously full of affection, so honest and sad and pure, that it feels like the departure of a close friend. The ostensible flaw of the series is that it’s too chock-full of characters and subplots to give them sufficient time to breathe, but that overstuffed quality is just right for a show about teenagers bursting with confusion and shame and desire. Hell, there’s a funeral scene during the sixth episode that’s overpowering in its tenderness… and I didn’t even particularly like the person who was dead. But that’s what great television can do: draw you inside its fictional world and make you feel at home. The title was a feint all along. For a show that purports to teach you about sex, what Sex Education really does is make you fall in love.

4. Fargo (FX, Season 5; 2020 rank: 22 of 124). I am a simple man. I don’t ask for much from a TV show. All I really need is Juno Temple turning a hairspray bottle into a flamethrower, and Jon Hamm reclining naked in an outdoor bathtub in a cowboy hat, and Jennifer Jason Leigh slapping her son by proxy, and a 500-year-old immortal Welsh warrior showing up at an old woman’s house and saying “I live here now,” and gas-station shootouts and Halloween electrocutions and underground-tunnel escapes and puppet-show reenactments and farcical election debates with three doppelgangers. Now, did I also need this new season of Fargo to integrate all of those elements into a propulsive crime thriller that touches on the systemic nature of spousal abuse and the industrial debt complex and the corrosive soul of the MAGA movement and the enduring clash between selfishness and decency and the cleansing power of homemade pancakes? Hardly. But to borrow from the pet attitudinal trait of Minnesotans: It sure was nice.

3. Succession (HBO, Season 4; 2021 rank: 7). The crazy thing about Succession isn’t how good it is—it’s how good it is while still being Succession. This is such a massively Important show, so Of the Moment, a piece of popular art with so many Things to Say: about election interference, about legacy media and disinformation, about inherited wealth and class warfare, about a million other Big Ideas. Burdened with such terrible relevance, you’d expect the series to collapse under its own weight. And yet, as pure entertainment, Succession is spectacular, with flavorful dialogue, pinpoint pacing, and a phenomenal command of plot and character—not to mention a murderer’s row of outstanding performances. (The best of those undoubtedly comes from Kieran Culkin. Wait, it’s Sarah Snook. No, it’s definitely Matthew Macfadyen. Ugh, did I really forget Jeremy Strong?) It isn’t quite accurate to say that the show succeeds apart from its themes, because the potency of its ideas is part of what lends it such tremendous energy. It’s more that it doesn’t allow its macro agenda to swallow its micro pleasures, and instead amalgamates the two in a blender that whips them into something historically significant and viscerally electrifying. And so: the siblings’ dispute in the eighth episode is especially resonant because their bickering might actually influence the course of American democracy; the seismic character of that development feels weirdly intimate because we’ve come to know those siblings so well. There is no artistic centrifuge, no separating the global from the personal. It’s all one big consequential mess, whether you’re talking about the Roy family or the whole damn world.

2. The Bear (FX on Hulu; Season 2; last year: 18). Now this is a surprise. I admired the first season of The Bear, in particular its white-knuckle penultimate episode, but it still kept me at a slight distance. Well, somebody must have added a new ingredient to the recipe, because Season 2 absolutely sizzles. (Sorry, I’ll stop.) I think it’s the patience. This show is the exact opposite of relaxed—it continues to move with a furious intensity—but it feels more assured now, less compelled to sweatily remind you of just how stressed-out everyone is and how high the stakes are. That results in some lovely subplots, such as Marcus’ journey to Denmark or Carmy’s simmering romance with an old flame (Molly Gordon, yay!). It also helps calibrate the show’s temperature, so that when it really turns up the heat—as during an epic flashback episode at Thanksgiving featuring an impossible array of guest actors (Bob Odenkirk! Jamie Lee Curtis!)—the humidity practically melts your screen. That installment arrives at the season’s midpoint, but The Bear impossibly sustains that level of energy for its remainder—not just with the instantly iconic “Forks” (featuring an all-time great Taylor Swift needle drop), but by building to a finale that’s devastating in its emotional authenticity. This show grabs hold of you and never relinquishes its grip, such that when it’s over, it’s unclear whether you need a mint or an exorcism.

1. The Last of Us (HBO, Season 1). Quite some time has passed since Roger Ebert declared that videogames can never be art. The accuracy of his statement is debatable (most opinions are), but it seems fair to say that a videogame is an unlikely source for a transcendent television adaptation. And yet, from a functional perspective, the alignment between videogames and TV makes perfect sense; what is every episode if not a level, a quest that needs to be completed before moving on to the next adventure? The Last of Us is a remarkable show for any number of reasons, but you can’t overlook its structural simplicity—how it leverages the concept of episodic television in such savvy and thrilling ways. The lion’s share of critical acclaim went to “Long, Long Time,” the achingly beautiful installment guest-starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as two survivors who turn a hellish dystopia into a quiet, unassuming bliss. It’s extraordinary, but it shouldn’t deflect attention from the series’ other exquisite mini-arcs: the agonizingly silent chase through a dilapidated cathedral, the flashback to a mall where hope and love meet their end, the horrifying sojourn at an apparent haven lorded over by a smiling tyrant (Scott Shepherd, still giving me nightmares).

Yet while all of these episodes are individually fantastic, The Last of Us is far more than just a series of cannily constructed corkers. It’s also about humanity (did you catch the title?)—our tenderness and cruelty, our ingenuity and brutality, our capacity to protect and our instinct to destroy. Together, Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal have crafted a relationship that, like the mossy vines connecting all of those hungry zombies, mutates with each new scene, bristling with tendrils of frustration, suspicion, and affection. This is a show about the end of one world and the beginning of a new one, which means it’s also a show about two smart, flawed people doing the best they can. Some might call it art. I call it grace.

(For the complete list of our 2023 TV rankings, click here.)