The Best TV Shows of 2023

Maybe the subhead of this story is a little hyperbolic. It’s impossible to watch everything on TV. Even if you had infinite hours and infinite brain space, it would still be impossible. But it is possible for people who watch TV for a living or a semi-living to determine what they like and they don’t like. This is the art and magic of criticism, and no one does it better than BFG. So four of our best present a list of, oh, let’s say 25 or 30 of their favorite shows from another great year of home viewing. Feel free to argue with us, though know that we always win.

Omar Gallaga

Reservation Dogs – Not just one of the best comedy-length TV shows of 2023, but one of the best of at least the last decade. This lived-in portrait of Native “Shitass” teens on a rural Oklahoma reservation got better and deeper through each of its three seasons on FX. Opting to go out on top, the final season zoomed in on generational traumas while generously sending off each of its stumbling-toward-adulthood main characters with love. One of the all-time greats.

The Last of Us – Beating the odds in so many ways, this smart and affecting HBO videogame adaptation (a zombie apocalypse show, no less) did everything right. Great casting (Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey), great storytelling, an epic production scale, and an unlikely offshoot episode that made a gay love story one of the most emotional hours of television of the year. Game producer Neil Druckmann found a perfect creative partner in Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin to find the deeply human tone. Last of Us managed a tricky balance of zombie action and spot-on father-surrogate daughter drama.

Primo – The best new sitcom you’re not watching, this whip-smart show on Amazon’s Prime Video’s Freevee confidently hit its stride only two episodes in. The raucous “Cookout” episode was laugh-out-loud funny, deftly balancing its main character, his five meddling uncles, and his deeply aggressive but loving mom (Christina Vidal, fantastic) through a trauma-inducing Labor Day barbecue. Shea Serrano’s San Antonio-set comedy was a revelation; it’s funny, specific, fast-moving and odd in the best way possible.

Beef – A strange journey that begins with a road rage incident between two Asian-Americans in Los Angeles (Ali Wong and Steven Yeun) and spins outward until it entangles everyone in both their lives. Truly unpredictable, hilarious, dark and, in the end, gracefully landed by creator Lee Sung Jin, Netflix’s “Beef” was unlike anything else on TV this year.

Honorable mentions: “Starstruck,” “Blue Eye Samurai,” “Poker Face,” “Mrs. Davis,” “The Bear,” “Barry,” “Platonic,” “This Fool,” “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson,” “Succession,” “How To With John Wilson.”

Scott Gold

The Fall of the House of Usher–Not everyone adored Mike Flanagan’s ambitious love/death letter to Edgar Allen Poe, but I’m one of the people who felt obligated to gush about it. As I wrote in my review, the miniseries had all of Flannagan’s hallmarks and more: stellar casting and performances, gorgeous production and sound design, sharp writing, and a delicious balance of family issues, jump scares and blood spatter. Sure, Flanagan overstuffs his series with references to Poe’s works, and the “big pharma bad” lesson was a little lazy, but I was more than okay with that. Flanagan has turned literary horror adaptations into one of the most prolific and successful careers in entertainment right now, and I am 100% here for it.

Scavengers Reign–This one was, hands down, the best series on television in 2023 that most of you have never heard of. For me, watching Scavenger’s Reign embodied the joyful surprise of discovering a work that is at turns beautiful, exhilarating, haunting, horrifying, gorgeous, and just overall brilliant. Its depiction of four humans shipwrecked and struggling to survive on a strange planet gave us something that sci-fi fans constantly seek out, but rarely find: a depiction of a world that is terrifyingly alien. Imagine the body horror of David Cronengberg or John Carpenter’s “The Thing” meeting Cameron’s “Avatar,” all depicted in the beautiful animation style of the comic series Saga. I don’t know if I enjoyed a series more this year, and I probably won’t next year. It’s that good.

Blue Eye Samurai–This bloody-beautiful series follows a rogue sword-slinger in 17th century Japan, as she embarks on a revenge odyssey to kill the four remaining white men in the nation. Each might be her father, and since society essentially viewed biracial children as monsters or demons at the time, her grudge is that entered the world only half-Asian, condemned to the life of an outcast. The animation – Western-style instead of anime, surprisingly – is fantastic, especially the fight scenes, which they filmed using actual human stunt choreographers before animating them, giving the action the feeling of weight and authenticity that animated martial arts often lacks. I couldn’t get enough of this one, and cannot wait for season two.

Neal Pollack

Succession–Someone once described The Sopranos, compared with the rest of the TV landscape, as Queen Elizabeth giving her lazy glove wave as her procession takes her past all the peasants who admire her. There’s always at least one show like that on TV, and for the last few years, it’s been Succession. In this season, its fourth and last, the plot wheel finally spun fast in Succession, with Logan Roy’s death, somehow gripping and vivid even though it occurred entirely off screen, a completely plausible portrayal of grief, and, of course, endless backstabbing and maneuvering to seize control of the empire, ending with a great tragedy for someone who totally deserved it. The ensemble cast was extraordinary, the writing funny and juicy, and the schadenfreude golden. Off to TV legend with this one.

Cunk On Earth–Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk finally arrived on Netflix so Americans could bear witness to one of comedy’s great characters, clueless and prudish, yet also scolding and horny, incredibly stupid and incurious. Somehow Philomena Cunk is therefore the perfect choice to narrate a complete history of the world. A vicious parody of pompous documentary programs and a damning indictment of all of humankind, Charlie Brooker’s creation, and Diane Morgan’s performance, was the funniest thing on TV this year.

History of the World, Part 2–Not everything in Nick Kroll, Ike Barinholtz, and Wanda Sykes’s homage to the legacy of the great Mel Brooks hit home. Some sketches fell completely flat, others were repetitive. And the series felt all out of order and out of whack. And yet when it did hit, like with an incredible Curb Your Enthusiasm parody of the story of Jesus, or Jack Black’s showstopper song as Josef Stalin, this show reminded us of everything we loved about History of the World Part 1 (which was also uneven and occasionally unfunny). Plus, we finally got to see Jews in Space. I am Jewt!

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson–Frat guys everywhere instantly got several new things to quote the weekend Tim Robinson’s sketch show arrived on Netflix. The Driving Crooner. Egg Game. 55 Burgers. There were monsters on the world. I’m trying to do something! I’m trying to write about something! Why can’t you just let me write about something! The greatest sketch show on TV didn’t lose a step.

Joan Is Awful–Not everything in Black Mirror’s recent season landed, but the Annie Murphy-starring episode, where she finds herself trapped in a simulation of her own life on “Streamberry,” a vicious Netflix parody, worked on every possible level. It was creepy, hilarious, and a little heartfelt, the absolute archetypal Black Mirror episode, an instant classic, perfectly pitched.

What We Do In The Shadows–Season 5 of FX’s vampire comedy still has plenty of bite, as the season’s main plotline, where sweet familiar Guillermo slowly turns into a vampire is hilarious, horrifying, weird, and ultimately moving. This is far and away the best sitcom on TV, with characters who you can literally plug into any situation. It almost never disappoints.

Gen V–Somehow, ‘The Boys’ managed to deepen its grip on superhero satire with this incisive, hilarious, and disgustingly gore-filled take on the “kids with superpowers” genre. Gen V takes every cliche of “young mutant”, turns it inside out, and, yes, psychically blows up its dick. Despite some wacky One Tree Hill-level soapiness, this show was always fun, watchable, and exciting, and expanded upon and enhanced the mythos of its parent show.

Justified: City Primeval and Reacher–These are two somewhat different shows. Justified is based on Elmore Leonard’s work and Reacher is based on Lee Child’s. Leonard is 10 times the writer that Child is, but Reacher is an amazing creation, brought to vivid life by Alan Ritchson, in a star-making performance as TV’s biggest side of beef. Slightly less beefy but just as tough, Timothy Olyphant brought back Raylan Givens, sticking the Appalachian lawman in the middle of Detroit city, a fish somewhat but not entirely out of water, with a wicked villain to fight in Boyd Holbrook. Both series are a bit overlong and full of absurd plot twists, but when the action comes, it comes good. More TV should feel like a good airport novel, and these shows are as addictive as the unhealthy snacks that Jack Reacher loves so much.

William Schwartz

The Glory– Too many feminine empowerment narratives these days amount to little more than dressing up the usual boring old hero’s journey template with feminist buzzwords and the color. So there’s something quite gratifying in The Glory’s approach to a woman’s revenge fantasy- not so much gratuitous violence, but quite a bit of scheming and social manipulation against a society that hates Song Hye-kyo’s heroine less for any particular reason than just because it’s always looking for excuses to hate somebody. The Glory’s villains manage to be deplorable without being cartoonish- which makes their inevitable downfall that much more gratifying.

Three Body–In a media environment increasingly convinced that consumers are too stupid to appreciate thoughtfully explained complex science, Tencent’s Three Body defies trends the Netflix version will almost certainly embody with meticulously slow pacing and constant dread to the Hugo prize winning novel’s existential astronomical mysteries. For those who can tolerate the densely technical sci-fi, there’s also a powerful flashback story bluntly depicting the brutal politicking of the Cultural Revolution. The full series is now available for free with English subtitles on YouTube, so there’s really no excuse not to at least give it a try.

Warrior–While Beef got most of the positive press this year for its depiction of angry Asians, Warrior in its third season is the superior proof of concept. Andrew Koji’s leading man may be a martial arts master, but he’s also a bit of a doof as he entangles his 19th century Chinatown gang in a counterfeiting scheme as his sister turned rival gang leader played by Dianne Doan likewise blunders when white people gullible enough to believe her immigrant sob story are also vicious enough to stab her in the back for tremendously petty reasons. I wouldn’t expect historical fidelity from this kind of genre show, yet Warrior excels time and again with a mood that’s both accurate and relatable.

Scavengers Reign–Just when animation seemed to be stagnating as a style, max inexplicably greenlit a twelve episode series based on this incredibly trippy wordless cartoon that manages to maintain all the biological weirdness while being quite economical with its dialog on a need to talk basis. There are so many fantastic alien creature designs here that after a point, you start to worry they’ll run out of ideas. The ending also manages the rare trick of being just open-ended enough that a second season is plausible, while still working as a standalone story.

Pluto–The opposite kind of good animation as Scavengers Reign, Pluto on Netflix is largely static in approach, allowing all the focus to linger on the original story- the twenty-year-old Pluto by Naoki Urasawa, itself an echo of the sixty-year-old The Greatest Robot on Earth in Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka. Don’t let the emphasis on robots fool you. Pluto is an intensely emotional work, a treatise on life and hatred as told by robots who aren’t supposed to be capable of either.