The 10 Best TV Shows of 2023

It was a strange year in television. The looming finales of critical darlings like Succession, Barry, and Ted Lasso, coupled with reports of a new era of cost-cutting and show-purging from streamers once flush with seemingly limitless budgets, prompted much hand-wringing over the end of Peak TV in exchange for a flood of algorithm-informed chum, shameless IP plays, and hastily thrown-together true-crime dreck ripped straight from the latest gory headlines. No wonder the writers and the actors went on strike, bringing Hollywood to a grinding halt for a period that history books will remember as “hot labor summer.” The effects of the dual strikes have been felt these past few months—and will continue to be felt heading into 2024—as release dates get pushed back and our sudden streaming-queue gaps get filled with more reality television, documentaries, and overseas productions.

Nevertheless: The year still had plenty of great shows. So many, in fact, that looking back on 2023, we turned to our wider Slate staff to pick their favorite shows of the year, along with some honorable mentions. May their choices give you something not about a recent murder to watch while television production catches up next year.

Since Game of Thrones aired its last episode in 2019, it has become something of a cliché, among avid TV watchers, to lament that it was the last show we all sat down to watch at the same time. But I would argue that there has continued to be plenty of appointment TV shows (albeit on a smaller scale), chief among them everyone’s favorite Murdoch-inspired HBO drama about a family at war with itself over a corporate throne. For four glorious seasons, Succession was the show to watch on Sunday night, at least for its extremely dedicated fan base made up of, sure, members of the media, but also viewers ranging from prestige-television diehards to terminally online teen girls who dubbed Kendall Roy “babygirl.” In the face of sky-high expectations heading into its final run of episodes, the series deftly toggled between its signature tragic and comic modes as it plunged into the depths of hubris, betrayal, and defeat (not to mention some light election interference). The result—anchored by sharp writing, confident direction, career-best performances, and a brilliant score by Nicholas Britell—was a sucker punch of a conclusion, one whose bruising impact will be felt for a long time to come. —Jenny G. Zhang

Streaming on Max.

John Wilson’s brilliant, one-of-a-kind series, which came to an end this year after three remarkable seasons, feels like the kind of thing you’ll tell your grandchildren you were alive to see. Ostensibly the product of Wilson’s free-associative wanderings around New York City, each episode follows a train of thought that takes him to locales as disparate as Burning Man and a convention of vacuum-cleaner collectors. It’s like spending an evening with your smartest, weirdest friend, the kind who tells stories so rambling you can never remember where they started, but it’s always worth holding on till the end. —Sam Adams

Streaming on Max.

It’s no simple task to make an original show about Indigenous teens dealing with a heartbreaking loss while coming of age in their community that not only avoids the pitfalls of stereotypes, but that also maintains a comedic heartbeat—Reservation Dogs managed to do that for three seasons. Two years after its first season—such a uniquely great run of episodes that I was sure any subsequent installments couldn’t compare—the series’ performances remain specific and strong, the humor remains intact, and its final season continues to convey the bittersweetness of life just as deftly as it ever did. In the end, Reservation Dogs concludes its yearslong rumination on life, death, love, and community with an exploration of what it means to say goodbye—for now or forever. —Nadira Goffe

Streaming on Hulu.

The Bear came back this year after an incredibly efficient first season that left everyone saying, “Yes, Chef” to the idea of a second course. It certainly delivered, dishing out 10 episodes that maintained the first season’s anxiety-inducing editing and dialogue, but learned to slow down when it needed to. If Season 1 was about protagonist Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) grief-stricken decision to come home and save his late brother’s failing sandwich shop, then Season 2 is about the ensemble of characters in the kitchen that helped him achieve a bigger goal of turning the shop into a fresh start. Each episode gives more insight into the lives of Carmy’s chosen family—his kitchenmates—as they overcome their own personal demons. There are celebrity cameos aplenty this time around, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out the best depiction of friendship currently on television. Luckily for all of us who are hungry for more, it’s already been renewed for yet another season. —N.G.

Streaming on Hulu.

As prestige TV morphed into something else, movie director Rian Johnson realized there was a hole in the market: Yes, people want stories that unfold novelistically over multiple episodes and seasons, but they also still very much want self-contained narratives that can be told in the span of an hour, Law & Order style. Enter: Poker Face. If you’re still skeptical—because, after all, we’ve been trained to watch TV so differently by streaming’s takeover—the other big thing this series has going for it is the so-charming-I-must-preemptively-threaten-to-fight-anyone-who-disagrees Natasha Lyonne as a kind of modern-day Columbo. But, as befitting our times, Lyonne’s Charlie is not a cop, just a gal on the run whose never-explained ability to magically detect when people are lying comes in handy when she also magically keeps finding herself in the vicinity of unsolved crimes. Sure, it’s retro, and you have to suspend a little disbelief, but if you do, you’ll be rewarded with something worth indulging in: Each episode in the first season was its own stylish little movie, complete with high production value and a true cavalcade of top-tier guest stars like Chloë Sevigny, Charles Melton, and Lil Rel Howery. —Heather Schwedel

Streaming on Peacock.

Season 3 marked the moment that The Righteous Gemstones became Danny McBride’s single best creative work, widening his storytelling ambitions while perfecting the balance between gut-splitting humor and wrenching pathos that defined Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals. This chapter of the Gemstones family saga confronts a new challenge for the televangelizing profiteers, as patriarch Eli (John Goodman) finally steps away from leading the family empire, leaving in charge his spoiled children, who naturally end up mismanaging everything. Yet there’s a bigger threat the family has to deal with: the return of Eli’s hated sister, whose husband and sons are caught up in a Waco-like doomsday militia and secretly planning revenge against the Gemstones. The show’s subplots are as hilarious and strangely moving as ever, spanning the younger Gemstones’ efforts to make use of their newfound power (cracking down on sex-toy shops, filming a Family Feud ripoff titled Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers) while reckoning with the scams, betrayals, and self-serving grafts endemic to the family’s decades-old enterprise. You never really know whether your tears are stemming from laughter or anguish. —Nitish Pahwa

Streaming on Max.

It took five years for Boots Riley to follow up his Afro-surrealist masterpiece Sorry to Bother You, but the wait was well worth it. I’m a Virgo, a seven-episode miniseries that premiered over the summer, offers a brutal indictment of modern-day racial and class hierarchies through a fantastic premise: a 13-foot-tall Black teenager, Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), hidden by his aunt and uncle from the outside world and stuck biding his time bingeing comic books and TV broadcasts—until he’s found out by a group of young local activists. From there, Cootie is launched right into the dangers his family wished for him to avoid: opportunists who fetishize him for his size, bigoted cops and vigilantes who make him out to be a menace, a capitalist system far too comfortable with Black death. It’s an imaginative, bleakly hilarious, occasionally devastating series that no one other than Boots Riley would have ever dared make. —N.P.

Streaming on Prime Video.

Spanning nearly 20 years and multiple video formats, Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary series follows a long and winding path from a New Jersey call center staffed with drug addicts and ex-cons to the offices of a U.S. senator. Our guide through the underbelly of telephone solicitation is Patrick J. Pespas, a former phone-sales whiz and recovering addict who both drives and derails the long investigation into criminal wrongdoing, sometimes disappearing for years at time, sometimes landing a crucial interview only to blow it at the last minute. It’s a ramshackle ride, but always a fascinating one, and ultimately an illustration of just how slim a chance any ordinary citizen has of bringing justice to the people in power. —S.A.

Streaming on Max.

There are many reasons I didn’t expect to love The Last of Us. I’m not a huge fan of zombie stories. (I never even started The Walking Dead.) I’m a bit of a scaredy cat. (I sometimes joke that we created Slate’s Scaredy Scale exclusively for me.) And most obviously, video game adaptations don’t have the greatest track record. (Even this year’s blockbuster Super Mario Bros. Movie was so concerned with pushing viewers’ nostalgia buttons that it forgot to write any good jokes.) But The Last of Us not only cleared the admittedly low bar of becoming history’s best video game adaptation, it raised it to a height that feels unlikely to be soared over anytime soon. The first couple of episodes are genuinely frightening (you’ll survive), but it’s with the third, one of the greatest stand-alone episodes of all time, that the series opens up like a fungal bloom, both unsettling and oddly beautiful. No wonder that, like the show’s “cordyceps” fungus itself, it soon seized the brains of tens of millions around the globe, setting ratings records for HBO Max. It never reached the heights of that third episode again, and it has its work cut out for it in Season 2, but even if you’ve resisted for this long, it’s worth letting this post-apocalyptic drama infect you. —Forrest Wickman

Streaming on Max.

There’s nothing quite like Beef. The series, which stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two strangers whose shared road-rage incident takes them down a path of mutually assured destruction, is as dark as it is funny, as crude as it is touching, as measured as it is off-the-rails absurd. What makes the show truly stand out is how it’s rooted in such a specific version of the Asian American experience—not the only experience, mind you, but one that is instantly recognizable to many of a certain demographic. Beef isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK. But those who do stick around will be rewarded with an explosive exploration of what it means to blow up one’s life in a blast of pure, unbridled rage—and whether anybody can emerge from that fallout, singed but still alive. —J.G.Z.

Streaming on Netflix.

Mask Girl: K-dramas just keep getting better as they take over the zeitgeist—something evident in director Kim Yong-hoon’s Mask Girl, which takes a page from Park Chan-wook’s book and turns an exploration of beauty standards, the generational effects of patriarchal violence, and obsession with fame into a dark, captivating comedy-thriller. —N.G.
Streaming on Netflix.

The Curse: Each episode of this series, starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder as would-be reality stars imposing their vision of progressive architecture on a downtrodden New Mexico community, is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever seen—until the next one. —S.A.
Streaming on Showtime and Paramount+.

Happy Valley: The third and final season of the British crime drama Happy Valley finally arrived seven years after the end of Season 2, and it was as wrenching as what came before. The protagonist, a police sergeant, is once again wrestling with the legacy of her dead daughter’s abuser, who breaks out of prison to pursue a relationship with his son, whom the sergeant has raised from birth. It’s a great crime show, but the illegal doings take a back seat to the family drama—an excavation of what it means to be related by blood, to love unconditionally, and to forgive. —Hillary Frey
Streaming on AMC+ and Acorn TV.

Jury Duty: I watched this show three times and loved it because, as it perfectly captured, jury duty is probably the closest our society has come to hell. I am thankful for the return of James Marsden; the uplifting of the naïve, lovable himbo; the Type-A representation, as exhibited by the producers and writers, who wrote multiple versions of every scene; and lastly, the beautiful homage to America’s holy land: Margaritaville. —Candice Lim
Streaming on Prime Video.

The Other Two: HBO Max’s other show about a family tested by the pursuit of success wrapped up its three seasons with a bittersweet and resonant finale about pulling back from the brink and realizing that no one is quite as irredeemable, or as noble, as they seem. —S.A.
Streaming on Max.

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson: Watching the frustrated characters played by the jug-eared genius Tim Robinson project 1,000 different flavors of furious is incredibly cathartic. This season also gave us the iconic “55 Burgers” sketch and the gift of looking back at two previous seasons of ITYSL, alongside the show’s other hyper-committed, hyper-online fans. —Rebecca Onion
Streaming on Netflix.

Barry: For all the attention heaped on HBO’s flashier Sunday night offering, I wished we had collectively paid more attention to Barry, the Bill Hader–helmed horror-comedy that aimed its ambitions incredibly high, and often delivered—or at least broke many molds, even when it faltered. This year’s most emotionally devastating moments of television all happened on Barry, for me. —Susan Matthews
Streaming on Max.