Now to the top 10. First off, what didn’t make my list and why am I so horrible for not considering it? There’s one that I just can’t get on board, and it wins all the awards and makes people argue over which horrible wealthy person they love the most and think should have all the money and they’d give their money to if they were real and ugh. That’s right, it’s “Succession”. Never gonna put it on my list, and those are just a few of the many reasons why.
Take a look at the #20-11 choices.
Allow me my yearly paragraph(s) to state I’ve tried “Succession” and I just can’t bring myself to get invested in billionaires fighting over money. I could barf at the thinkpieces that came out when the series landed, telling us how AOC and Elizabeth Warren could change their messaging to acknowledge that wealth was its own punishment. I went to a boarding prep school on a ton of scholarship and financial aid. I learned to chameleon in with a lot of rich people – probably not that well, but the point is I got to see some of those families in their natural environment.
Some were good, some were bad, some were kind, some were awful, some families suffered horribly from their wealth, others were having the time of their lives with it. Wealth is not some excruciating burden the rich suffer so the rest of us don’t have to, nor should suffering while happening to be wealthy excuse someone from the corruption and abuse that wealth augments.
I don’t know why we keep telling ourselves the myth of the burdened billionaire, or if I do know I think it disappoints me too much to think that could possibly be the case. I understand this isn’t all of what “Succession” does, but it is a part of it, and it genuinely grates on me. I love a lot of the actors on “Succession” and I was jumping up and down telling everyone about Sarah Snook years beforehand, but…I just can’t get on board a segment of the priorities “Succession” relies upon to tell its story. There’s an entry on this list (“Queenmaker”) that asks many of the same questions, investigates accountability and redemption in very realistic terms, and does so without falling into traditional pitfalls of choosing our favorite billionaire that we’ve had countless opportunities to outgrow.
Is that an unreasonable judgment on “Succession”? I look around and see so many amazing series that I can spend my reason on better. Like this:
10. Am I Being Unreasonable?
(Hulu) Nic is a mother who self-medicates with alcohol to dull a traumatic loss. She dislikes her marriage and feels isolated until she meets a new mom at school. This would be Jen, and the pair find joy feeding on each others’ chaos. Our first impression of every character isn’t good, and that’s the point. “Am I Being Unreasonable?” constantly morphs genres and perspectives in order to reconsider our previous impressions and reveal how wrong they were.
What’s remarkable and unique about “Am I Being Unreasonable?” is that our judgments become the framework of the storytelling. The series sells itself and its characters short in our eyes to appear simpler and sillier than it really is, only to take a 90 degree turn and reveal what’s really happening…and then another 90 degree turn from there to reveal a new misread we’ve made. The thing is, the show rarely distracts or lies. It just lets us make assumptions, and then gives us more information so we can realize how toxic and misleading the assumptions we’ve made have been.
Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli play Nic and Jen, and also write and showrun the series. I started out disliking every character because the question in the title isn’t just about them – it’s about the viewer. The series casts in stark relief how much we rely on being unreasonable in order to tell and be told stories – on the screen and in real life. (Read the review.)
9. The Apothecary Diaries
(Crunchyroll) Maomao is a girl who serves as the apothecary for a red-light district. On her way home, she’s kidnapped and sold as a servant to the Imperial Palace. She tries to keep her head down as she serves out a forced 2-year contract, but as the emperor’s children grow ill, she has to pipe up when she’s the only one with the knowledge to help them.
Her experience with poisons gets her promoted as a food taster in the Inner Palace, where the emperor’s four concubines and their ladies-in-waiting reside. Mysteries both intentional and accidental flourish among the court politics, some women finding it an honor to be there, others wanting out. A eunuch who Maomao bristles at runs the Inner Palace and harasses her, but she tolerates him because he brings her cases and allows her free reign to experiment with foods and medicines. She learns to get what she wants while still drawing clear lines and being protected by the concubine she serves.
Maomao is an exceptional and complicated character. She’s obsessed with testing poisons on herself and is quick to assess what someone else’s goals are. She’s ambitiously lazy, but also doesn’t want others shouldering work that she could be helping with. She’s content to be walked all over when she doesn’t see anything to gain from standing up, but she can command a room and fearsomely put everyone in their place when there’s a truth that must be communicated. She doesn’t want to be noticed and fears making a mistake that will see her executed, but she’ll dismiss and scold royalty if it means saving someone. She’s an exceptional detective, but she often protects the criminals when she thinks their actions have reason, or the revelation of a truth will do more harm than good.
The mysteries themselves are varied and the motives human – often understandable, if misguided. No two mysteries follow the same formula in terms of the investigation and the evolution of clues, making the path each takes feel tenuous and consequential.
The art is stunning, often at the level of a film. It’s colorful and its sense of lighting is evocative. It also has a great eye for timing – whether it’s for the broadest physical comedy or the smallest change in a character’s expression. This is up there with the very best mystery series I’ve seen in the last several years.
8. The Worst of Evil
(Hulu) Gicheul is a club DJ in 1990s Gangnam. Discontent with his role as a minor drug dealer within a crime syndicate, he quietly masses a rebellion against the region’s leader and takes the area over.
Junmo is a tenacious rural police officer who is chosen to go undercover and join Gicheul’s gang. The only problem is that Gicheul once knew Junmo’s wife Euijung, and that she’s a police officer. A chance encounter complicates Junmo’s cover story and throws Euijung into the fray.
What makes “The Worst of Evil” work so well is its focus on small details. Emotional vulnerabilities give Junmo access to the gang as he pretends to be a fallen comrade’s cousin. They’re also what let Gicheul exploit Junmo and Euijung as the undercover operation becomes messier and messier.
But those emotions are just the start. That fine detail work lets them sell their undercover stories. It’s not emotional distrust that begins to carve away Gicheul’s confidence in Junmo, or even the introduction of Euijung. It’s a small, everyday detail overlooked in an operation that throws a wrench into the works. What threatens Junmo the most is the operation he’s a part of making too many of these small mistakes.
The fight choreography is beautifully choreographed chaos, where technique rises and falls as mass fights get more and more desperate. It creates an ebb and flow where characters lose and regain control over how they engage others. It’s choreography that communicates there are rarely winners in a fight, but rather a side that can afford the human cost more than the other. The set design and cinematography are brilliant and repulsive. It feels like everything’s coated in a layer of cigarette ash, which complements the visual translation of the series’ barely controlled violence. It forms a well of brutality over which Junmo and Gicheul dance, where the real clash is how quickly Gicheul can erode details as Junmo and his undercover operation improvise and manipulate new ones into being. (Read the review.)
7. Skip and Loafer
(Crunchyroll) We go from the most brutal entry on this list to the kindest. Mitsumi dreams of working in government, so she transfers from the countryside to a Tokyo high school. She stays with her Aunt Nao, a trans woman who is deeply nurturing and protective of her niece.
Mitsumi has a plan for school, but her anxieties are realized when everything that can go wrong does. Luckily, her first friend there is a supportive boy named Sosuke. He’s effortlessly popular, but feels isolated by guilt and harbors a sadness at his core. Whereas Mitsumi is filled with anxiety and struggles socially, she also has a deep well of hope and carries with her the support of her community and family.
Mitsumi and Sosuke are two beautifully human characters who recognize the ways in which the other needs kindness and support. Even if they don’t always realize how or why, they draw what’s best out of each other, and those around them start doing this for each other, too.
Director Deai Kotomi has an eye for picking up the subtle ways in which people feel vulnerable, mask that vulnerability, or feel safe enough around someone to unmask it. Her sunny, breezy, pastel color scheme is punctuated by deeply textural visual moments. Mitsumi’s hometown is a breathtaking work of art, told in one episode I can only describe as utter peace. The series is beautiful and heartwarming and made me cry for the rarest of reasons – not because anything sad happens, but just because it feels like a place where it’s reassuring to do so. “Skip and Loafer” is a gift of kindness. (Read the mini-review.)
6. Reservation Dogs
(Hulu) If you haven’t started “Reservation Dogs”, you’re lucky. You’ve got three seasons of one of the funniest and most touching shows waiting for you. The comedy follows four Native American teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma. The third season finds them returning from a disastrous but very needed trip. It’s filled with brilliantly interwoven jokes, where one punchline barely finishes before the next is set up.
Episodes aren’t afraid of following tangents, only to reveal later how that tangent is deeply related to a character or their community. By now, the mythological Deer Lady has gotten an episode a season, and this season’s is a devastating entry housed in history.
She’s not alone – “Reservation Dogs” makes the best use of guest stars of any series running. Graham Greene has a beautifully felt performance, and there’s a surprise or two later in the season. “Reservation Dogs” is rife with humor that pokes fun at white co-optations of Native experiences, excising these and replacing them with far better, indigenous comedy. The cast is a blend of actors and comedians young and old who have extremely different approaches, and showrunner Sterlin Harjo utilizes this to make every episode flexible and unpredictable. You rarely know what’s actually going to happen next, whether it will be outlandish or understated, raucous comedy or piercing drama.
“Reservation Dogs” has made my top 10 each of its three seasons. It boasts some of the best individual episodes of every year it’s been on. Give it a try if you haven’t; it’s well worth it.
5. Queenmaker
CW: sexual assault, suicide
(Netflix) Cutthroat corporate strategist Hwang Do Hee has never met a truth she couldn’t massage through the media and turn on its head. Her unswerving loyalty to the wealthy Son family she serves causes her to disbelieve a sexual assault victim and bully her toward an NDA, covering up a rape by Son’s son-in-law Baek Jae Min and resulting in the victim’s suicide. Her illusions broken, Do Hee goes to war with the family she once served.
The Son family runs Baek himself for mayor of Seoul, Korea’s capital. The position is a stepping stone to the Korean presidency. Do Hee approaches Oh Kyung Sook, an incorruptible lawyer-turned-activist who’s never met a truth she isn’t willing to fight for, and who very justifiably hates Do Hee. The pair decide to run Oh as a candidate, Do Hee maneuvering according to her own talents, but bound by Oh’s ethics instead of her own.
This series has the writing of the year for me. A lot happens, so much that it’s difficult to believe it could all transpire in one election…until you look around at how much more happens in our real-life elections. It’s strange that so much slander and narrative would strain belief in a fictional election, yet barely equate to a week in one of our own.
Moon Ji Young wrote the series, and she makes the cascade of fights, slander, and strategies feed off each other and swing one into the next – all the way highlighting how media buys, journalists, corporate promises, backroom deals, social media, and consumerism can be manipulated into favoring a dangerous candidate. Moreover, she demonstrates how each can be used uniquely against a qualified and proven woman running for office. The politics may be specifically Korean, but even as someone in the U.S. there’s a mountain here that speaks to what our own political landscape has barely endured.
This is the best ensemble of the year for me, and offers some of the most complex and varied roles written for women as they dominate the main cast – as a wealthy matriarch, a daughter with intermittent explosive disorder, another who bides her time, a corporate strategist trying to live up to a Do Hee’s legend, as a heroic activist turned politician, another activist who betrayed her movement, as a journalist, as a researcher, the list goes on.
Through it all, Moon’s writing paints a staggering story of Do Hee pursuing her own accountability and redemption, even if too late. Kim Hee Ae’s Do Hee is a role that’s Shakespearian in its dynamism. She’s detestable, but human in understanding how she became so. She conveys how easy it is for anyone to cross a line and treat others with horror so long as they think they’re right. Her ability to draw our ire and shock even as she draws our empathy, for us to hate her before we want to see her eviscerate the people who taught her and expected her to do hateful things – it’s a complex web that Do Hee herself is undoing.
Kim’s performance shows us how easily someone we can understand as a hero in one minute could be weaponized by those with more money and power the next. Moon’s writing investigates whether someone who’s done something so horrible and irreversible can become accountable and through their actions use what they know about inhabiting and enabling corruption to protect and help others. Neither gives us easy answers, but the questions drive one of the very best political shows I’ve ever seen.
4. Beef
(Netflix) A man tries backing out of his parking space. A woman in a passing SUV blocks him in and lays on the horn. Both think the other’s at fault, and escalate a road rage incident until they’re enacting elaborate plans to ruin the other’s life. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are phenomenal, in turns wearing their pain as raging anger and hiding it to fit into the expectations of their families.
Rage has become each of their coping mechanisms. They’re both products of trauma, and they both see kindness as a shameful act, something to reject aggressively or take advantage of before it takes advantage of them. What makes “Beef” work so profoundly is that it can still find so much in people like this to empathize with and understand. It doesn’t give us every detail of how they got this way, but rather enough of the shape of it for us to understand there is some tether back neither can reach anymore. The pair hate each other because they hate themselves, and recognize someone who’s similar enough that hurting them feels like hurting themselves.
“Beef” is absurdist and satirical, but it treats late-stage capitalism and the implicit racism inherent to assimilation as targets that can be expressed in grounded detail. It saves the conceptual for its metaphysical finale, a gobsmacking left turn that clarifies the habit forming nature of rage as a reaction to pain. “Beef” is a dark comedy at its core, but isn’t afraid of undermining and interrupting itself on behalf of our characters’ journeys. It’s weird, ultimately transcendent, and staggeringly brilliant. (Read the review.)
3. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
(Crunchyroll) Here is one of the best realized pieces of fantasy I’ve ever seen. It covers not the journey to end an ancient evil, but what happens afterwards. As an elf, a 10 year, life-defining journey for her human companions is less than a hundredth of Frieren’s own life. It’s not until later that it becomes clear the connections she made on that journey have lingered. For someone who lives so long, a feeling like that can take years to begin to understand, and at that point those companions she wants to be close to have already started dying.
This is such a beautiful, beautiful contemplation of the meaning of those who’ve passed, housed within a fantasy world where we see day-to-day life – even if the stories themselves are spread out over years and decades. As Frieren takes on an apprentice – a human girl named Fern – and begins a new journey to a place where she might speak with the dead, we see moments both small and large.
One episode is simply about Frieren finding a flower so she can use a spell to grow a field of them. There’s good reason for it, but that reason is deeply personal. Another episode is a raging, breakneck battle, filmed still in that longing way fantasy can uniquely evoke. Yet another episode is about why a battle is over before it’s even begun, a flashback that describes Frieren’s unique relationship to magic.
I love magic in my fantasy, but I hate the way it’s usually portrayed, like Harry Potter and company treating wands like six-shooters in a Western. If you have magic, make it magic. Make it weird, give it its own logic, put us in awe of its beauty and danger. “Frieren” does so over and over again.
The elf herself is a character who feels truly alien to us, who sees the world through such a different lens. If we smile every day, she might smile every 20 and still smile just as often in her life as we do in ours. The different emotional clock is portrayed in a way we get to learn, and begin to appreciate.
The animation…it just feels. It feels off the screen as dappled light and worn pavement stones and the lines of growth on trees. It frames characters as part of their environment. “Frieren” convinces so soundly that its world exists, and it genuinely sparks wonder and awe. In many ways, I still don’t know how “Frieren” does everything it does. It is a piece of magic. Maybe I don’t want to know, because I don’t want its spell to be broken. It transports you like few other things ever have. (Read the review.)
2. The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House
This Japanese slice-of-life series follows two best friends as they leave home. Kiyo and Sumire are on their way to train as geisha, not as the scandalous American cinematic make-believe, but as performers who live together and train seriously in traditional dance and choreography. Sumire is a natural, but no matter how hard she works, Kiyo washes out. She’s not capable of keeping up.
Before she’s sent home, Kiyo asks to cook a meal. The regular cook, or makanai, is injured. And Kiyo can cook. With the old makanai’s permission, Kiyo takes over the role and stays in the house with Sumire. Their paths diverge, but they still walk them together.
There’s very little conflict to “The Makanai”. Characters face decisions, and discuss them, but handle them in realistic, practical fashion. But “The Makanai” finds so much beauty in the ordinary, in the everyday. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a show that’s so calm – not slow, not boring, not unfocused…just calm.
There’s always a conversation, a character we can better understand, an action being taken. The throughline is that these characters take the uncomplicated route – and uncomplicated is no less worthy of attention. Everyday tasks are filmed beautifully, as an art in and of themselves that it is necessary for the camera to appreciate. “The Makanai” communicates a sense of fulfillment, and finds no correct path to it.
There’s a line about Kiyo – and you’ll hear it in the trailer: “That girl is meant to make things instead of being made into something”. Sumire is the one whose talent is being molded, to take what’s already been created and express it through herself. Kiyo’s talent is in creation, and in that creation to express others back to themselves. There are still other characters who have other approaches, and they each find their way to art, and their need to be making it every day in close connection with each other. (Read the review.)
1. The Last of Us
This series is undeniable. I say this as someone who dislikes most post-apocalypse stories. I pretty much only like the wackily off-kilter or quietly tone-heavy stuff. Too many post-apocalypse stories are there to be spectacles, with only a half-hearted wave to deeper themes. “The Last of Us” eschews the spectacle for the personal. It sticks close to its characters, and only shows that wider world in glimpses, encounters that are better avoided. Any view that sees far is too dangerous to exist in for long.
Joel is a traumatized mercenary tasked with transporting a girl named Ellie across the United States. She’s immune to the fungal plague that’s decimated the planet. Getting her to a rumored research base might lead to finding a cure. The way there is uncharted and filled with unknown risks.
“The Last of Us” is about perseverance without hope, of knowing what hope must be because you know the hope-shaped hole that exists, and so acting as you would if you had it, emulating what you’d do if it still survived. Bella Ramsey’s Ellie is the best performance of the year, so utterly realistic in a space that is anything but. To out-act Pedro Pascal at the top of his game is unthinkable, and she does it. The ensemble is superb: Pascal, Anna Torv, Melanie Lynskey, Lamar Johnson, and of course Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
The way “The Last of Us” shapes what we know of these characters, how we anticipate their responses, and appreciate what they’ve sacrificed…it guides us toward developments that we couldn’t have anticipated but fully grasp as they happen. We learn about these characters during their journey, and through the eyes of others’ experiences…but there’s a quieter, subconscious understanding of them we also begin to gather – elements we understand about someone but never need to put into action until things have gone wrong even more than they normally do.
“The Last of Us” gets right what the post-apocalypse genre overwhelmingly gets wrong – it gives us reasons to learn about and deeply understand its characters so that we’re on the journey with them, so that the smallest moment of unexpected quiet is larger than the most ridiculous of spectacles, so that a single word can cave us in more than an entire argument, so that the violence of an internal moment can make us question humanity more than any outward struggle ever could. (Read “The Saddest Series of 2023”.)
The Best of the Unseen
Well, maybe not the best of the unseen so much as the top of my To See list. There are still series from 2023 I’d like to see but haven’t yet – and so can’t put on a list like this. Maybe I would have included them, maybe not. The top on that list are U.S. sci-fi animation “Scavengers Reign”, Korean superhero drama “Moving”, Japanese reincarnation mystery “Oshi No Ko”, German detective story “Dear Child”, British sci-fi mystery “Bodies”, and Indian legal drama “Trial by Fire”.
Also, anything that premiered after Dec. 20 I’m magically making a part of 2024. Korean cosmic horror “Gyeongseong Creature” would’ve made this top 20, but there’s only so much time to watch, write, and finalize a list like this. I reviewed its first several episodes, but I’m still working through the later ones.
Honorable Mentions?
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”, gothic horror anime “Undead Girl Murder Farce”, Korean musical drama “Castaway Diva”, the beautifully edited romance “My Love Story with Yamada-kun”, and British historical mockumentary “Cunk on Earth” are all well worth your time.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 