The year TV stopped apologizing
2023 was the year the prestige-TV bubble was supposed to burst. The streaming wars cooled, budgets got scrutinized, shows got cancelled mid-cliffhanger. And yet the work that landed in 2023 was some of the most confident television in years. Succession ended as the gold standard of the era. The Bear won every award in sight. Slow Horses kept proving that British espionage drama had figured something out that American TV hadn't. The list of series that deserved more attention than they got is longer than it should be. What follows is a ranking, a reckoning, and a few arguments worth having.
The major awards players
The series that dominated the conversation from Emmy night to the end of the year
Succession stuck the landing. Barely.
The finale of Succession divided viewers almost perfectly along lines of temperament. Optimists wanted a winner. Realists got the show they deserved. The genius of the last season is that it made Kendall sympathetic enough to sting when the floor dropped out from under him, then spent about fifteen minutes reminding you that he had it coming. It is not a perfect season of television, but it is the correct ending, and the 'Connor's Wedding' episode is the finest hour the show ever produced.
The critical darlings
Loved by every serious TV writer, criminally under-watched
The Bear is good. It is also slightly overrated.
Season one of The Bear was a technical marvel and a genuinely new use of television as a medium. Season two, which is the one that swept awards season in 2023, is something slightly different: an anthology of beautiful, occasionally self-indulgent character studies loosely wrapped around a restaurant opening. 'Fishes,' the holiday episode, is extraordinary. The season as a whole is more interested in its own craftsmanship than in moving anywhere. That is fine. But handing it every trophy in the building while Beef existed in the same calendar year is the kind of award-season groupthink that should embarrass people.
Bold swings
Series that tried something most shows wouldn't dare, regardless of whether it fully worked
Poker Face is the best procedural CBS never made, on a streaming service that doesn't quite know what it has.CrossBinge
Genre standouts
The best work being done inside a specific mode: thriller, sci-fi, horror, comedy
Slow Horses is the best spy show on television and nobody talks about it enough
Slow Horses returned in 2023 and continued to be the most rigorously unglamorous spy series ever made. Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb is television's greatest anti-hero precisely because the show refuses to let him be secretly good at heart: he is competent, occasionally heroic, and also genuinely unpleasant to everyone around him. The adaptation of Mick Herron's source novels has cracked the code that Tinker Tailor cracked on film: espionage drama where the enemy is usually bureaucracy. The Emmy nominations it has not received are a running indictment of Academy voters who can't get past the Apple TV+ algorithm.
The ones that deserved more
Overlooked on release, underrated in the recap, worth your time now
The Last of Us was the best and worst thing to happen to game adaptations
The first episode of The Last of Us (setting aside the brief framing prologue, which stumbles) is as good as television adaptation gets: patient, earned, devastating. The problem it created is that every subsequent video game adaptation will now be benchmarked against a moment, the 'Long Long Time' episode, that has almost nothing to do with the source material. That episode works because showrunner Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann understood that the game's emotional logic can be extended, not just translated. The rest of the season is merely very good. The bar it set may be impossible to clear.
The crowd favorites
High-volume, high-engagement series that delivered exactly what audiences came for
The year's defining argument
The through-line of 2023's best television is the workplace. The Bear in a kitchen, Succession in a boardroom, Abbott Elementary in a Philadelphia public school, Slow Horses in a building that smells of failure, even Barry in the permanent workplace of a hitman trying to become a person. The shows that landed were all, at some level, about what work costs people and whether it costs them too much. That is either a sign of the times or a sign that writers in their thirties and forties are the ones running the rooms now. Either way, it produced a better year of television than the cynics expected.