It's a new year, which means the Best of 2023 lists have come out. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: we do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet and spat out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best albums, books, video games and movies. You're welcome.
The Best TV Shows Of 2023
10. 'Happy Valley — Season 3' (BBC)
Happy Valley may seem, on the surface, like a cozy British procedural to curl up with after a stressful day. If you didn't already realize that isn't the case from the first two seasons, season three will make it clear. It's a profound look at family, morality, and the harshness of life. We've waited seven years for it to arrive, and every single second was worth the wait.
[Collider]
Buy it on YouTube
9. 'Jury Duty' (Amazon Freevee)
That wholesomeness ends up being one of "Jury Duty's" greatest strengths, because while the case may be totally fake, much of the bonding we see is real. The end result feels like the love child of "Candid Camera" and "Parks and Recreation." Yes, we get plenty of laughs, but we also get an unexpected amount of hope about how people will rise to the occasion in even the strangest of scenarios.
[Mashable]
Watch it on Amazon
8. 'Dead Ringers' (Prime Video)
This is an extraordinary series, one that — like "Lady Macbeth" and too few examples of streaming-era horror TV — locates subtlety, humor, beauty and the contradictions of womanhood in the most operatically unhinged of stories. Preserving the skeleton of Cronenberg's film, with its stylized sets and campy tone, Birch fleshes out "Dead Ringers" by widening its thematic scope and injecting a brand of delivery-room realism that heightens its shock value.
[TIME]
Watch it on Amazon
7. 'Barry — Season 4' (HBO)
The show continues to take risks through the eleventh hour, shifting gears halfway through the season in an audacious twist. But it also has a firm handle on what the story seems to call for in terms of its tone. Barry may be unable to acknowledge his own failings, but as it prepares to exit stage left, "Barry" knows exactly what it is.
[Variety]
Watch it on Max
6. 'Poker Face' (Peacock)
The plots might wrap themselves up a little too conveniently at times (and the writing involves the casual use of ableist slurs, something that American TV still seems unwilling to grapple with) but the anarchic spirit of "Poker Face" carries it through. As a reinvention of the hour-long mystery story, it manages reverence to its forebears with the challenge of delivering a distinctive new twist.
Watch it on Peacock
5. 'The Last of Us' (HBO)
Comfortably the best adaptation of a video-game ever made: one that deepens the game's dystopian lore, while staying true to its emotional core. Like the game, it's a masterpiece, too.
[Empire]
Watch it on Max
4. 'Beef' (Netflix)
Anchored by a pair of the best performances you'll see this year in anything, "Beef" is daring in how it allows its protagonists to be villains while also turning them into mirrors for ourselves. We've all had bad days. And we're all a blink away from making a stupid decision.
Watch it on Netflix
3. 'Reservation Dogs — Season 3' (Hulu)
"Reservation Dogs" leaves the stage earning its distinction as a fantastic television series that will likely go down as one of the greats of the 21st century. It was also an incubator for a collection of massively talented Indigenous storytellers, in front of and behind the cameras. Having witnessed what they were able to accomplish together, one can't help but be very excited, and hopeful, about what they'll do next.
[IGN]
Watch it on Hulu
2. 'Succession — Season 4' (HBO)
The plot arc of "Succession" — a winner-takes-all bloodbath of wealth and greed — hasn't changed, but these episodes are darker and more savage than I anticipated. The stakes mount in a breathtakingly rapid way. It's a little unbearable that this will be the end of a show that hasn't, in the end, blazed a trail of new series equally smart and character-driven. There's plenty to like on TV, but "Succession" still manages to seem like the only game in town.
Watch it on Max
1. 'The Bear — Season 2' (Hulu)
The writing remains incredible. Fleet, funny (it's one of the rare purveyors of convincing naturalistic jokes and jibes between friends and colleagues), and always moving seamlessly from light to dark moments and back again as only people as deeply connected as these can do, it never makes a false move.
Watch it on Hulu
A Note On Methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).
[Image credit: Illustration by Rangely García; From left: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai in "Reservation Dogs," Jeremy Allen White in "The Bear," Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen in "Succession," Ali Wong in "Beef"]
