TV Rankings

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. Read More

Is TV getting worse, or am I just getting grouchier? This is my tenth straight year conducting this exercise, which has typically functioned as an opportunity for me to flaunt my indecent enthusiasm for television. Movies and TV aren’t a zero-sum game—it’s possible to admire both forms of storytelling without denigrating one in favor of the other—and while I spend the vast majority of my time writing about cinema, this is the one week where I can pay proper homage to the small screen.

So why, in assessing the TV of 2023, am I gripped by a powerful sense of malaise? It hasn’t been for lack of viewing options. True, from a certain self-loathing perspective, the amount of television I consumed this past year was substandard: a mere 94 shows—my lowest figure since 2018 and down dramatically from my pandemic peak of 124 in 2020. That said, watching every episode of nearly 100 different TV shows in a single year probably seems outrageous to your average, healthy, not-completely-obsessed-with-art individual. What’s relatively meager for me is surely obscene for most. Read More

In case you missed it, we’ve spent the past week painstakingly ranking all 110 TV shows that we watched in 2022. Naturally, each show comes with its own detailed capsule, but if you’re one of those people who’s only interested in the actual rankings—and who gets irritated by all of that pesky writing—then this post is for you. All of the rankings are included below; to access a particular piece and view its corresponding blurbs, click on the appropriate link in the header. Read More

Entering the home stretch, we’re nearly finished with our rankings of every TV show of 2022. For prior installments, check out the following links:

#s 110-96
#s 95-81
#s 80-61
#s 60-41
#s 40-31
#s 30-21

20. The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, Season 5; last year: 12 of 108). Here’s a philosophical conundrum: What if a once-great TV show stayed great and nobody noticed? It’s fair to accuse the fifth season of The Handmaid’s Tale of creative stasis, at least in stretches; there are only so many ways for Elisabeth Moss to gaze intently at the camera in prolonged close-up. But even if the series stops short of fully reinventing itself, it nevertheless continues to reshape its thorny dystopia in provocative ways. Moss brings her “A” game every episode, the visuals still possess their haunting amber glow, and Bradley Whitford has turned an archetype into one of the most weirdly complex villains on TV. “Do you have an irony deficiency?” he deadpans at one point. But The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t lack for much—not black humor, not unpredictability, and not spellbinding shots of Moss staring into your soul. Read More