Here we are once more, as I run down my favorite TV I watched for the seventh consecutive year. That makes this possibly the longest commitment in my life outside of my marriage. A terrifying thought, but I’ll deal with any existential crises in my own time.
Let’s start with, as always, a quick rundown of some things in the year in TV– stuff I didn’t watch, specials I did watch, and a few other stray notes– before moving on to the countdown.
Shows I never watched and you will not see on this list
The Bear
Succession
There are more than those two, to be sure, but they seem to be the two at the top of every other critic’s list this year. Others include Beef, For All Mankind, Fargo, and The Last of Us (and probably anything based on pre-existing intellectual property, come to think of it).
I have been meaning to catch up on The Other Two, though.
Shows I tried and couldn’t convince myself to stick with
Krapopolis
I made it through two episodes and it was just alarmingly flat and unoriginal. Normally I’d be inclined to give a creative team I trusted more time, but Dan Harmon had Community and Rick and Morty ripping right out of the gate. I’m not even sure what he’s trying to do here– the characters haven’t been interesting and the jokes have been a mix of the most obvious jokes and self-aware references that don’t really stand on their own two legs. But the show is already renewed for three seasons, so I’ll keep an ear out in case it significantly improves.
Lucky Hank
This one is less about the show not being up to quality and me just struggling to find time or keep myself interested enough in it. Pretty good for what it is from the two episodes I saw, but having spent enough time in the academic-literary-fiction world and dealing with the egos therein, I had a tough time pushing myself to keep going with it, and Mrs. Captain certainly wasn’t pushing me to do so. It was pretty good, though, if that type of show is your thing.
Here’s a few shows you may have seen in previous years that you won’t see this year, and why:
RIP (canceled after 2022)
Reboot
I Love That For You
Mr. Mayor
Pivoting
Kenan
Skipping 2023 and back in 2024
Hacks
House of the Dragon
Mythic Quest
Girls5eva
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Mythic Quest is the only one that doesn’t have a confirmed 2024 release yet. Curb and Girls5eva have their dates set already (February 4 and March 14, respectively); Hacks is projected for the spring and House of the Dragon for summer.
I thought about including a list of shows that ended in 2023, but then I realized that would be spoiling fully one-quarter of the countdown, so I didn’t.
Not appearing on a technicality
Cunk on Earth
It technically premiered in the States on Netflix in January 2023, but since it had premiered in the UK in September 2022, I of course wasn’t going to wait for it to officially come stateside to see it. I wrote about it in last year’s writeup.
Now a quick run-down of the year’s best specials (i.e. the ones I watched), before we move on to the countdown.
Marc Maron
From Bleak to Dark
HBO
Probably Maron’s best special, after nearly 40 years in comedy. Age and experience help with that, but he also deals with the grief from losing his partner Lynn Shelton in 2020 and that’s really powerful. It came out in February and I have since forgotten any more specific thoughts I had on it. (I couldn’t even find any of my old notes on it to plagiarize.)
Alan Partridge
Stratagem
Amazon Prime
Another special from Alan Partridge, this time a presentation in the motivational speaker / life coach vein. What exactly is the “stratagem”? Frankly, after seeing it I still couldn’t tell you; this is Alan, so you’re going to get a whole lot of bullshit and a lot of Alan’s pedantic and ill-at-ease mind wandering off the script. But it is very funny with a very funny final twist. Also check out the latest book / audiobook from Alan, Big Beacon, which came out in October. Also released this year: the third season of Alan’s podcast From the Oasthouse, which you should really get around to if you haven’t by now.
John Mulaney
Baby J
Netflix
Probably Mulaney’s best special, although he has a few strong contenders so it’s close. Definitely his most confessional, as he digs into his struggles with addiction. Probably my favorite standup special of the year.
Stavros Halkias
Fat Rascal
Netflix
A mix of stories about being Greek, being a large fat man of large appetites, and crowd work, Halkias has a more polished set here than on last year’s Live at the Lodge Room. Fun times.
Nick Mullen
Year of the Dragon
YouTube
Mullen’s comedy is less story-based and more about simply finding the humor in the kinds of things he thinks about (which you may have some idea of what those are if you ever listened to Cum Town or The Adam Friedland Show). This was a difficult special to evaluate, as I was at one of the two Denver shows where he taped it, but I had a good enough time watching it that I’d bet it’s even better if you come in without having heard the jokes before.
And now we kick off the formal countdown. There are thirty-six shows on the list, which I was planning to break up into four sections of nine, until I realized that I’d want to write more at length about shows higher on the list, and that the rankings didn’t really break up evenly by tiers. In an effort to both balance the articles by tier and word count, we’re going through ten today, ten Wednesday, nine Thursday, and the final seven Friday.
Let’s get going with our first batch of shows, which I can definitely confirm are shows I watched:
36. Home Economics
Season 3
ABC
This is the end for Home Economics, and while I’m bummed it was canceled, I noticed more than ever this season that it felt more like comfort food that I enjoyed but didn’t make me laugh as much as I hoped.
But, also, only three episodes aired in 2023, as the third-season order was cut to 13 episodes before the show was ultimately canceled. I am a little disappointed we won’t get Jimmy Tatro as hedge-fund bro Connor running for mayor of San Francisco.
35. Futurama
Season 11
Hulu
Did air more than three episodes, some of them good (the finale was a highlight), some okay, and a couple pretty bad. (I was shocked at how little I laughed at “How the West Was 1010001,” and “The Prince and the Product” might have been the worst episode in the show’s entire run.) I guess there was enough here to merit the revival, although I don’t think either revival has reached the level of quality of the show’s original run. But, uh, here it is.
34. Animal Control
Season 1
FOX
Joel McHale returns to network sitcoms in what has apparently been a pretty big hit for FOX (relative to the standards of what qualifies as a network TV hit these days). Animal Control follows the shenanigans of the Northwest Seattle division of the department. Our primary focus is the partnership between McHale’s Frank Shaw, a former cop fired for exposing corruption in the department, and the rookie officer and ex-champion snowboarder Fred “Shred” Taylor (Michael Rowland). Frank is a gruff autodidact who’s very standoffish and resolute in refusing to open up and make new friends, which makes the friendly and easygoing Shred a challenge for him. The show’s other main characters include the other officer partnership, harried family man Amit Patel (Ravi Patel) and party girl Victoria Sands (Grace Palmer), as well as the clumsy but eager to prove herself office manager Emily Price (Vella Lovell).
Rowland is a real find here; he started as a standup and doesn’t seem to have any significant acting credits before this role, but he’s great with Shred’s enthusiasm and eagerness to please, as well as dealing with the more dramatic undercurrent in Shred’s story: Now that a knee injury has retired him from snowboarding, what do you do when something you’ve worked your whole life to become great at is just over? Especially when it happens this young?
All in all, though, it’s a pretty breezy show with some fun animal shenanigans and rivalries with other departments and the like. (I bet a crossover episode with Tacoma FD would be fun.) Solid network sitcom fare that probably won’t win any awards but is also a decent way to spend half an hour once a week.
33. Grand Crew
Season 2
NBC
The crew’s shenanigans continue in season 2, most notably with whatever is budding between Anthony and Fay, and with Sherman’s attempts to find a new career and kick-start his adult life. Another solid network sitcom that was pretty fun, although NBC didn’t really seem to do much for it in terms of promotion, and now it’s been cancelled. Still, worth checking out at some point if you want to watch a well-done Black network sitcom.
32. Barry
Season 4
HBO
I’ve seen shows fail because their creator fell in love with the characters too much. I’ve seen shows fail because their creator hated the characters and treated the audience with contempt for enjoying them. I’ve seen shows fail because the creator left and their replacement couldn’t quite bring the same tone and feel to the show.
I don’t think, before Barry, I’d ever seen a show fail because the creator just got bored with the whole thing.
This was one of the best shows on TV its first two seasons, and the ending felt like Bill Hader and Alec Berg said “Who cares, let’s just wrap this shit up. Bill wants to get to directing.” Lots of lazy plotting and glossing over details that Hader and Berg never would have done in the first two seasons. Lots of weird, incongruous character fates. Lots of time spent not advancing the plot. Lots of stuff that just plain didn’t make sense. Great performances, particularly by Sarah Goldberg, but geez, what happened to the craft of storytelling this show once had?
31. The Great North
Season 3
FOX
The writers strike or something else interrupted production on this show, so season 4 didn’t return until this month. The limited run makes it tough for me to boost it higher among the field we have this year, with the number of strong shows we’ve yet to get to. But after a wonky start the series has been steadily improving and developing its world and cast of characters, and it’s become pretty good. I mean, if you like Bob’s Burgers, it’s highly unlikely you won’t like this.
30. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Season 16
FXX
A solid season with no real duds and a couple of very funny episodes (“Frank vs. Russia,” “Risk E. Rat’s Pizza and Amusement Center”). At this point I don’t expect Sunny to reach its previous highs or to achieve anything new or groundbreaking. But as long as it’s actually good and not bad, that’s fine with me.
29. Abbott Elementary
Season 2
ABC
This ranking is not a slam on Abbott in any way. It wasn’t any worse than last season, and it’s still one of the best sitcoms on network. 2023 was just loaded. Mr. Johnson gets promoted to main cast this year; the main overarching storylines dig into Janine’s personal life: her breakup with Tariq, her will-they-won’t-they with Gregory, and the mother and sister that helped shape Janine into who she is. That, and there’s a running story about an attempt by a charter school company to take over Abbott.
Other than that, it’s more or less exactly what you’d expect after season 1; more day-in-the-life of teaching at an underfunded school and dealing with all of that. And it’s still quite funny and the cast is very good.
28. Ted Lasso
Season 3
Apple+
Ted Lasso joins Barry in the pantheon of shows that started out at a level of greatness and fizzled toward the end. In season 3 the show moved even further from its roots, with even less of what I liked about season 1 and even more of what I didn’t about season 2. It ranks higher than Barry because it still was, at least, capable of delivering us a few great moments when it remembered what it was about (Jamie Tartt’s eureka moment about the new offense being the best one), and the ending set the characters more or less in the places they were supposed to be. There wasn’t a lot of care taken on the journeys to those places, with too many side plots that served as missed opportunities and much too much skipping over crucial scenes and developments in the main stories, but somehow there was still more care taken than Barry had.
I just look back at my “True Optimism vs. Hopepunk” article, and feel a little saddened that Ted Lasso became, indeed, a Niceness Show.
27. Justified: City Primeval
Miniseries (?)
FX
On the bright side, it’s good to have Raylan Givens back. On the downside, the lack of counterweight of Harlan County culture and/or Boyd Crowder made the season suffer; nothing in this series felt distinctly Detroit, and there were too many characters and not enough time given to develop most of them. The villain is a little cartoonish; between his murder-happiness and carefree recklessness, it’s a wonder no criminal organization snuffed out Clement Mansell a decade ago for being more trouble than he’s worth.
Did I mention Raylan Givens is back, though?
Watching him do his thing was a fun enough welcome return that that alone gave this show a boost it might not have merited on quality alone. The lack of better development of setting and side characters, and the lack of case-of-the-week adventures to give the story some forward momentum, really made it suffer by comparison to the original run, though. (I would say “even season 5 is better,” but that doesn’t carry as much weight coming from me since I think the public largely underrates season 5.)
I suspect this is not the end of the Justified universe, though, particularly based on that final act in the series’ final episode. (Hence the question mark– if this show continues, is City Primeval still a miniseries, or does it become season 7 of the original show?) All that said, even though it wasn’t as good as the original, if you wanted to see Raylan Givens on your screen again, it’ll certainly do.
Come back tomorrow for the continued countdown.