Here are the 10 television series that stood out in 2023.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 Here are the 10 television series that stood out in 2023.
00:09 Poker Face.
00:11 Natasha Lyonne stars as a rumpled citizen detective
00:15 in a Columbo homage created by Rian Johnson.
00:18 The show could have been made on autopilot
00:20 and still charmed viewers.
00:22 Instead, we got 10 episodes of case of the week magic
00:26 that sent Lyonne's human polygraph
00:28 on a cross-country road trip,
00:30 pausing to solve murders at barbecue joints,
00:33 retirement communities, and more.
00:36 Each stop was its own social world,
00:38 populated by delightful guest stars
00:41 like Chloe Sevigny, Nick Nolte, and Hong Chao.
00:45 And before the mysteries could get too cozy,
00:47 Johnson upped the stakes
00:49 and challenged Lyonne's wabi-sabi sage persona,
00:52 setting up a second season that's bound to surprise.
00:55 (gun cocks)
00:56 (man screams)
00:58 - Hey!
00:59 - Would you be mad if I went somewhere anti-gay
01:00 for my honeymoon?
01:02 - Hello, sweet sister.
01:04 - The Other Two.
01:06 The Other Two premiered with a narrow premise.
01:09 A teen finds overnight fame as a Justin Bieber clone
01:12 and his underachieving adult siblings ride his coattails.
01:16 But it evolved into a sharp, consistently hilarious satire
01:19 of the entertainment industry at large.
01:21 Matriarch Pat became a window into the cult
01:24 of the daytime talk show queen.
01:26 Eldest son, Carrie, exemplified the humiliations
01:29 of the D-list actor and would-be gay icon.
01:33 And sister, Brooke, learned to swim
01:35 in shark-infested boardrooms.
01:37 The show's third and final season
01:39 was the biggest and smartest of all,
01:41 capturing the demented ambition, streaming fatigue,
01:45 and fickle politics that define contemporary Hollywood.
01:48 Dead Ringers.
01:51 The year's most unlikely reboot was also its most inspired.
01:55 In repurposing David Cronenberg's 1988 horror movie
01:58 about twin OB/GYNs torn asunder
02:01 when one falls for a glamorous patient,
02:03 creator Alice Birch entrusted the brilliant Rachel Wise
02:07 with the dual role originated by Jeremy Irons.
02:10 No shallow gender flip, the adjustment endowed the allegory
02:13 with new layers of meaning.
02:15 This Dead Ringers meets a moment
02:17 when women's bodies are a battleground,
02:20 a humane birth experience has become a luxury item,
02:23 and the ghosts of brutal reproductive research past
02:26 cast dark shadows over the high-tech obstetrics
02:29 of the present.
02:30 Telemarketers.
02:34 True crime docuseries are more numerous
02:36 but also more formulaic than ever.
02:39 Telemarketers is different.
02:41 Drawing on wild footage he shot of fellow employees
02:44 cutting up at the anything-goes offices
02:46 of a notorious telemarketing company,
02:49 co-director Sam Lipman Stern embarks on a quest
02:52 to expose an industry that's even shadier than it seems.
02:56 While the series' mood is light,
02:58 the investigation couldn't be more serious.
03:01 With former co-worker Patrick J. Pespis
03:04 as citizen journalist and moral beacon,
03:06 Lipman Stern unravels a web of amoral entrepreneurs,
03:11 corrupt police organizations, and government cowardice.
03:14 - You know you can tell me anything, right?
03:18 - Of course.
03:21 The curse.
03:22 Nathan Fielder follows last year's
03:24 brain-breaking The Rehearsal
03:26 by teaming up with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone
03:29 for a scripted series that burrows even deeper
03:31 into the fraught relationships
03:33 between reality TV and reality.
03:36 In dissecting the interactions of a couple
03:38 shooting an eco-conscious real estate series for HGTV,
03:42 Fielder and co-creator Safdie touch third-rail issues
03:46 like gentrification, cultural appropriation,
03:49 and colonialism.
03:51 The precision with which each episode provokes and unsettles
03:55 echoes such masters of productive discomfort
03:58 as Hitchcock and Kafka.
03:59 - What is your problem? What?
04:06 - Beef.
04:11 What could be more timely than a show about anger?
04:14 Creator Lee Seung Jin casts Ali Wong and Steven Yeun
04:18 as LA drivers whose road rage encounter
04:21 escalates into a prank war
04:23 that threatens to ruin both of their lives.
04:25 Each party's fury is rooted in a lifetime of repression.
04:30 While the show isn't about Asian American identities per se,
04:33 it's grounded in the ethnic communities
04:35 to which the characters belong
04:37 and specific to protagonists grappling
04:40 with inequality, stereotyping,
04:42 and the expectations of immigrant parents.
04:45 Darkly hilarious but also profoundly observant,
04:48 Beef pairs the racially-tinged negative emotions
04:51 that the poet Cathy Park Hong famously named
04:54 "minor feelings" with major stakes.
04:57 [horn honks]
04:58 - Hey! Are you guys leaving,
05:00 or are you just gonna sit there?
05:01 - What'd you say? What'd you say?
05:02 - Say it again! I dare you to say it again!
05:04 - "Rain Dogs."
05:07 - I promise you I will write us out of here.
05:11 - No, don't promise. Just try.
05:13 - An intimate portrait of a fascinatingly
05:15 unconventional family,
05:17 "Rain Dogs" follows a peep show dancer and aspiring writer
05:21 struggling to support her tween daughter
05:23 with dubious help from her recently-incarcerated
05:26 gay best friend.
05:27 He comes from a posh family.
05:29 She can rarely make rent.
05:31 He's a sadist.
05:32 She has masochistic tendencies.
05:35 They're toxic together, and they know it,
05:37 but they can't stand to be apart.
05:39 Creator Cash Carraway strikes the perfect balance
05:42 of grit, warmth, and scathing British humor,
05:45 ensuring that this dramedy
05:46 neither trivializes its character's pain
05:49 nor devolves into a pity party.
05:51 "I'm a Virgo."
05:56 The streaming arm of a megacorp
05:58 led by one of the world's richest people
06:00 kicked off 2023's hot labor summer
06:03 with this flagrantly anti-capitalist comedy
06:07 from radical rapper and "Sorry to Bother You"
06:09 filmmaker Boots Riley.
06:12 His surreal allegory casts Jharrel Jerome as Cootie,
06:15 a 13-foot-tall teen folk hero for our times
06:19 and a gentle giant who must learn
06:21 that powerful forces within American society
06:24 will always see a strong Black man as a thug and a threat.
06:28 Riley's secret weapons are humor and humanism.
06:32 His message may be militant,
06:34 but he delivers it in a package cushioned by laughs,
06:38 love, and a lively vision of liberation.
06:41 "Succession" and "Reservation Dogs."
06:49 This was the rare year when two series brilliantly
06:53 in their own ways fulfilled the potential of television.
06:56 "Succession," an Emmy-winning drama
06:58 that drove water-cooler conversation,
07:00 was the obvious choice.
07:02 Creator Jesse Armstrong and his virtuosic cast
07:05 didn't waste a second of the show's final arc,
07:08 which unfolded largely in the aftermath
07:10 of media mogul Logan Roy's
07:12 ingeniously executed midair death.
07:15 Every episode earned the fanfare that greeted it.
07:18 Swedish tech edgelord Lukas Madsen
07:20 waging psychological warfare on the Roy kids in Norway.
07:24 That white-knuckle election episode.
07:26 That tour-de-force funeral episode.
07:29 The bangers just kept coming.
07:31 And the finale made the biggest bang of all,
07:34 ending a race to the bottom that everyone,
07:36 especially the broken Roy siblings, won.
07:39 -Here to tell you a tale as old as time.
07:46 -"Reservation Dogs," by contrast,
07:48 never chased the zeitgeist.
07:51 Sterling Harjo's dramedy chronicled
07:53 the hijinks of outsiders,
07:55 Native American teens on a reservation
07:57 mourning a friend who died by suicide.
08:00 Profane, poignant, at times psychedelic,
08:03 the series moved fluidly between adolescent awkwardness,
08:07 small-town character comedy, indigenous spirituality,
08:11 and the righteous anger of the disenfranchised.
08:14 While the teenage "Res Dogs" remained at the show's center,
08:17 its circle kept expanding
08:19 until it encompassed the entire community,
08:22 young and old, living and spectral.
08:25 Yet the two shows had plenty in common.
08:27 Both were irreverent.
08:29 Both mixed poetically foul-mouthed comedy and tragedy.
08:33 Both had profound things to say
08:34 about the sociopolitical realities of our time,
08:38 insights they accessed through finely wrought characters
08:41 unique to their worlds,
08:43 lonely masters of the universe in one case,
08:46 members of a disadvantaged
08:48 but fiercely loving community in the other.
08:51 Together, they capture the polarized extreme
08:54 of American life in the year that was.
08:56 ♪♪