The best entertainment of 2023: Our picks for the top TV shows, movies, music and more
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Forget hot labor summer, it was hot labor year. This was undeniably and unequivocally the year of Hollywood labor disputes. The historic double strike by writers and actors against studios and streamers shut down almost all productions and upended the fall TV schedule. But 2023 still yielded stellar small-screen and big-screen offerings. And the year was rich with must-hear albums, catchy songs, memorable museum exhibitions, brilliant theater, poignant video games and the finest fiction.
Christopher Nolan's epic "Oppenheimer" — one-half of the biggest moviegoing event in recent memory — and Celine Song's beautifully bittersweet "Past Lives" were among Justin Chang's picks for best movies of the year. On the TV front, Lorraine Ali honored the final season of FX's "Reservation Dogs" and the freshman season of HBO's "cinematic masterpiece" "The Last of Us," while Robert Lloyd heralded Prime Video's weird and wonderful "I'm a Virgo" and Apple TV+'s "far-flung, fast-moving" "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters."
The year also gifted us new albums by SZA, Olivia Rodrigo, Lana Del Rey and Foo Fighters — Mikael Wood calls the latter's "But Here We Are" "a thoroughly alive-sounding document of loss." Meanwhile, the 50 best songs of 2023 are as diverse as Miley Cyrus' "Flowers" and Burna Boy's "City Boys."
The best of the year also paid homage to the past: Our sampling of fiction included a feminist take on George Orwell's "1984" that rivals the original; it was Stephen Sondheim galore in Charles McNulty's picks for top Los Angeles theater offerings; and Christopher Knight spotlighted a big survey of Keith Haring's art at the Broad.
Check back in as we roll out new best-of lists daily.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
