A Hat on a Hat

City Chicken presents 2023 Faves

Dec 21, 2023

Last week, I published an end-of-year TV round-up essay for The New Republic. It’s about watching TV in the time of strikes and AI hype and global catastrophe, but it’s also about my favorite show of the year: Somebody, Somewhere. I think you should read it! Implicit within that essay is a rough list of my top TV shows of the year. In the interest of giving these shows more time than they get in the essay, I thought I’d send out a proper year-end list omnibus. This includes my top ten TV series and assorted TV related honors as well as my books of the year and the essays and criticism I’ve read in 2023 that inspired me.

Let it rip:

THE TEN BEST SHOWS OF THE YEAR, ACCORDING TO ME, A PERSON WHO PROBABLY DOESN’T LIKE SUCCESSION AS MUCH AS YOU DO

1. Somebody, Somewhere (HBO / Max)

I think it’s possible that, at some point in the past, a hypnotist hypnotized me so that whenever I hear the little piano and horn tune that plays over the title card for this show, I feel totally calm and relaxed. So, I’m not sure if I am ranking this show number one because it is a genuinely small, genuinely hilarious, genuinely great piece of television art about overcoming loneliness or, again, because, in a moment that has been functionally erased from my memory, a comedic stage hypnotist hypnotized me in front of a shocked and delighted crowd of thousands in a theater setting. Either way, try the “Saint Louis Sushi.”

2. The Bear (FX / hulu)

FX dumping all ten of the episodes of this second season was an absurd choice. Slotting into the TV discourse right after Succession had vacated it, The Bear had the opportunity to hold onto our attention for months, but they went with the dump instead. There are aspects of the season that really pop in a binge format — “Forks” feels almost incandescent if you watch it immediately after the emotional devastation of “Fishes” — but I think FX really lost something by not giving this incredible batch of episodes a long rollout. I will return to all of them again — I already have — but I do wish we’d been forced to savor them a little more.

3. I’m a Virgo (Amazon Prime)

Everybody is talking about Christopher Nolan’s practical effects shots in Oppenheimer, but the practical effects that most impressed me this year were the ones that Boots Riley used to make this surreal vision of Oakland come to life. I’ve just very simply never seen anything like this. Neither have you, probably. A lot of shows pretend to being “radical” or something, but I’m a Virgo genuinely is — politically, aesthetically, conceptually.

4. Reservation Dogs (FX / hulu)

I’ve written a lot of words about this show. Suffice it to say, this was a gorgeous — if a little uneven — ending for a really special show. I did feel a little sad that Paulina Alexis’ Willie Jack didn’t get a true standalone in the final season. She was the emotional anchor for the final stretch, but I want to see Alexis in basically everything going forward, and another true showcase episode would have been great.

5. Bluey (Disney Plus)

I am never not impressed watching an episode of this cartoon show for children about Australian dogs. It’s the most efficient seven minutes you can get on streaming. I’ve also said a lot about Bluey in the past, but, for sheer narrative ingenuity and derring-do, you’ll get more to think and feel about from this family of dogs in seven minutes than you will from a vast majority of streaming series in the same amount of time.

6. Mrs. Davis (Peacock)

I think I wrote most of what I have to say about this show here. It’s incredible that it exists at all. The less I say before you watch, the better.

7. A Murder at the End of the World (FX / hulu)

I love The OA. I think Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij should get a blank check from some streamer to make whatever they want for as long as they want. A Murder at the End of the World is genre work for these two weirdos, but it’s imbued with everything that makes their artsier material so distinctive. I would watch several more seasons of “The Darby Hart Mysteries.”

8. The Golden Bachelor (ABC / hulu)

We hadn’t watched the Bachelor franchise in a while but returned for this. The main dude turns out to be the same kind of cowardly dingleberry we’re used to, but the real revelation of this show was the comedy and pathos of, like, twenty women between the ages of 60 and 80 living in the Bachelor mansion together. The ensemble cast of this show was wonderful. We normally skip or fast-forward through the Men/Women-Tell-All special, the grotesque ritual by which ordinary people who were on TV transform into naturalized citizens of Bachelor Nation, but I cried real actual tears during the Women-Tell-All special of this season. I get nothing from admitting this to you. I hope that the follow-up season is just all these same women living in an elderly sorority, cooking elaborate dinners for each other and making fart jokes.

9. Starstruck (Max)

The third season of Rose Matafeo’s tart, effervescent rom-com series is not as briskly charming as the first, but it’s a significant rebound from a second season that dragged for some reason. I think Matafeo is good at writing and playing flirtation, and having a new love interest on the scene kept the show working with its strengths. I’ve said this before, but this show is the best show to recommend to people. So I say to you: watch it!

10. All the old Justified episodes I watched in order to review the new, kind of bad, reboot (FX / hulu)

Gah, this show. Now that’s television.

MY FAVORITE PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR (ANY SIZE)

Clark Backo, The Changeling

Paulina Alexis, Reservoir Dogs

Betty Gilpin, Mrs. Davis

Emma Corrin, A Murder at the End of the World

Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder, The Curse

Murray Hill, Somebody, Somewhere

Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Ayo Edebiri, The Bear

Rebecca Ferguson, Silo

Vinny Thomas, Platonic

Matthew MacFadyen, Succession

SHOWS ON APPLE THAT ARE CENTRALLY ABOUT PEOPLE GETTING FROM POINT A TO POINT B IN A SHOW-SPECIFIC WAY

Apple TV+ has a show called Silo that is about people walking up and down the stairs. It has a show called Hijack that is about flying on a plane. It has a show called For All Mankind that is about flying in a spaceship. The people on Slow Horses don’t go anywhere despite the fact that the show’s title implies they’ll be riding on horseback. Maybe that’s why it’s the best of the bunch. But, really, these series are all roughly equally pleasant to watch. Choose a method of transportation, and enjoy the show.

THE LITTLE KITCHEN IN A TENT IN DAVID AND VICTORIA BECKHAM’S BACK YARD

THIS ONE INCREDIBLE FOUR-EPISODE RUN IN THE NEW BATCH OF BLUEY

I wrote already about how impressive Bluey is at a formal level. Disney dropping a new batch of episodes in the middle of the summer was a gift to the girls. We were in Northern Michigan when it happened, visiting friends with kids roughly the same age as ours. The morning the episodes appeared on the app all anyone could talk about was “Turtle Boy,” one of the show’s patented, melancholy, inspirational playground episodes. But it was equally wild to me that Bluey followed up what might ordinarily have been a season highlight with three absolute heaters. “Onesies” is a perfect “adults-only” episode that uses an especially zany Bingo caper to distract from a really sad, touching, just barely subterranean plotline about Chili and her estranged sister (voiced by Rose Byrne); “Tradies” kind of reverses that structure as an episode in which Bluey and Bingo creatively, but erroneously, imagine the inner lives of grown-ups; “Granny Mobile” is probably the funniest episode of television (any category or age-range) I saw this year.