The 10 Best Series of 2023

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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The Saddest Series of 2023 — “The Last of Us”

There are different types of sadness. Some rend. Some hollow us out slowly over time. Some we’re able to visit less as time passes. Some are shared as truths for others to help bear the load. Some are lies that only free us up by passing the burden on. Our post-apocalypse stories tend to center around hopefulness or hopelessness. In Western stories, we’ve long tended to investigate individualism surviving cruelty. “The Last of Us” throws hope out the window – not as hopelessness, but as a concern that isn’t its primary focus.

The world’s been taken over by a fungal plague. The fungi cordyceps is known for infecting insects and seizing their motor functions. In “The Last of Us”, it’s adapted to a warmer climate and therefore can infect warm-blooded hosts. It makes the shift from insects to mammals.

Ellie is a child born with immunity, the only one known. It’s up to Joel, an old, traumatized mercenary, to protect her as they travel across the country in search of a science lab that can harness Ellie’s immunity into a vaccine.

When I say hope isn’t the primary focus of “The Last of Us”, I don’t mean that hopelessness is. Hope is there in Ellie’s immunity, and defines the breakaway third episode ‘Long, Long Time’. Hopelessness is present in the circumstances of so many they pass…but both are set aside. Both are so, so far to see from anywhere in the story. No one here has time for hope or hopelessness. Both cost too much energy. Neither is “The Last of Us” an examination of survival. Survival is there, but it’s not dwelt on. Sacrifices are sudden and practical. “The Last of Us” isn’t even about individualism. In fact, it repeatedly rejects it in favor of collectivism enabling survival and rebuilding. “The Last of Us” isn’t about cruelty either. It’s visited, but again – it’s not the focus as it is in so many post-apocalypse stories. It isn’t even about how dire things are; that’s just the landscape. The series is unlike the post-apocalypses we’ve seen in the past because it’s not here to rubberneck. There’s no spectacle that thrives. Ethics and cruelty are each in turn visited and witnessed, but they don’t change the fact Ellie and Joel need to move on.

“The Last of Us” throws out many of the typical things our post-apocalypse stories are built to cover. Instead, it focuses simply on perseverance. Its focus isn’t a key moment, the goal being chased, or even the journey. All these things are present, but above all else, the story here is just about putting one foot in front of the other because it’s what needs to be done.

Fear, injury, hate, love, need, comfort, vengeance…Ellie and Joel pass each of these by because they’re just waypoints. They avoid confrontation and even when they’re drawn in, their end goal is to just keep on walking west. “The Last of Us” involves stellar action and horror, and it has that “Watership Down” quality of happening upon settlements both terrifying and wonderful. But like that novel, you do what you need to do to keep on walking. You can’t fix everything if you’re already trying to fix the thing in front of you. Sometimes you’re just a witness, as awful as that is.

“The Last of Us” is one of the worlds in which it would be most tempting to just give up. Sometimes hope fades. That’s why we’ve got other emotions and abilities. Hope isn’t magical; it can’t exist on its own. Sometimes we need anger. Sometimes we need perseverance. Sometimes we need those things that bridge the gap when hope is a long way from returning. That’s why “The Last of Us” feels so real. It isn’t two-dimensional about the presence or lack of hope. You don’t stop and lament the absence of hope; you use the other things you’re built from to do what you would do if you had it anyway. If hope shows up, great, what a relief. If it doesn’t, you’re still putting one foot in front of the other, doing the work to get closer to something more than survival. Hope can be a product of circumstance, timing, narrative. There are times when we’re not lucky enough for that circumstance, but if we don’t keep on stepping toward it, how will those who follow know which way to continue? So you put one foot in front of the other because: it’s what needs to be done.

And then the rug is pulled from under us. What happens when hope returns in a swell too large to handle? What happens when we’re safe, when that perseverance can take a break, but hope runs uninformed, free of the context of perseverance, of kindness and anger, of all those other things that give hope shape and purpose?

Hope is a wonderful thing, and it is protective and often just. It is not the only thing. It has to exist alongside all the other pieces that make us. Hope has to be more than personal; it has to be informed. After so many sadnesses along the way, so many sacrifices, what happens when we shear all those other pieces away because we haven’t had hope for so long that we forget what it connects to?

Many of the types of sadness above, I know how to endure. Without spoilers, the sadness that “The Last of Us” considers last is so deeply unexpected and complex, I’m not sure we’re built to have defenses against it.

What I Said Last Year

My choice for Saddest Series last year was “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners”. You saw it coming like a freight train. It sundered hope. It tore you down. It was a vision of meaningless sacrifice, of a world that paints letting others down, of letting their lives and memories be erased and overwritten, as an inevitability, a systemic design. It was devastating art.

It was designed as a standalone, one season series. Thank whoever had the sense to stay true to that. It allows “Edgerunners” to tell its story clear of any need to drop cliffhangers or leave doors open. The story it has to tell, the point it has to make…it needed to have the freedom to conclude.

It is the saddest, most emptying series I’ve ever seen. There’s importance in that. I hold it so close to my heart. The first notes of Rosa Walton’s “I Really Want to Stay At Your House” are still enough to get me tearing up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t want to shield myself and lose the part of myself that can feel that way.

Calling something sad might feel like it would dissuade you from seeing it, but whether it’s “Edgerunners”, “The Last of Us”, or something else, stories that make us feel this way give us safe places to practice parts of ourselves we would only feel otherwise under trauma. You can’t understand a part of yourself during trauma. We need other opportunities, through story, to feel these things, these sadnesses and losses, free of personal trauma and anxiety. Stories give us that. As sad as they can be, they also give us beauty and meaning through lenses we would otherwise avoid. Everyone tolerates sadness in storytelling differently, but please don’t be afraid of it. Be willing to test it. It can help us sit with pieces of ourselves we would otherwise pretend don’t exist.

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The Top 10 (but really 14) Series of 2023 So Far

A road rage incident spurs escalating vengeance. A chef wants to realize his dream restaurant. A sugar glass artist fights slander and scorn. Two women lie to survive as mothers. Modern diplomacy collapses into nationalism. Teachers try to make do. Three people stand against 30. A country girl dreams of politics and finds a support system. A cook and a dancer realize their art. A man and a girl travel the post-apocalypse.

If 2023 shakes me to my core, I’m glad that the art we have shakes back. I’m glad it’s angry. I’m glad it’s beautiful. I’m glad when it’s violent, I’m glad when it’s gentle. I’m glad when it reassures. I’m glad when it can’t and presses forward anyway. These lists are often made to rank things and that’s unavoidable. Top ten means better than the next 10. My interest isn’t in what’s better, though, it’s in what’s meaningful, what sticks in our head, those places where we store pieces of ourselves for a hard winter, those shows we can go back to when we’re so shaken we need a bit of help finding ourselves again. ‘Better’ might come into that, but none of us is objective. I’d rather just go with what’s close to my soul.

There are still a few series I haven’t seen that might end up on my year-end list. Top of the to-watch pile includes The Good Bad Mother, Oshi No Ko, Silo, and Trial by Fire. You won’t see them below…yet.

A few honorable mentions first:

“Copenhagen Cowboy” (Netflix) is the most Nicolas Winding Refn that Nicolas Winding Refn has ever been. The Danish series visits upon aliens, vampires, sex work, phallic obsessions, and neon mind battles. Its one-shot long takes are masterpieces of craftsmanship and tests of fortitude…but the series keeps on sticking in my mind and refuses to leave.

“Cunk on Earth” (Netflix) sees the world’s worst documentary host describe the history of the world in a highly produced BBC documentary. The satire of confident ignorance is one of the funniest things streaming today. Diane Morgan’s perfected her portrayal of host Philomena Cunk to such a degree that her performance at times becomes strangely transcendent.

It’s been a banner year for anime, or rather it was just a ridiculously good spring season. There’s the dark fantasy “Hell’s Paradise” (Crunchyroll), where a convicted ninja with a thousand yard stare and his executioner – the only woman with the job – are tasked with retrieving an elixir of immortality from a dangerous, surreal island.

Then you’ve got “Insomniacs After School” (HiDive), a coming-of-age tale about two students with insomnia who start an astronomy club together. It’s an incredibly honest portrayal of the experience of feeling othered and being unable to change the nature of what makes you different – but finding someone who provides a space safe enough to start understanding yourself.

On to the top 10, in no particular order except saving my favorite two for last:

The Diplomat

(Netflix) Keri Russell enjoys the performance of her career as a diplomat re-assigned to the U.K. – usually a posh post given as a reward for campaign donors, not nose-to-the-grindstone negotiators. This takes place after a British warship is attacked near Iran. Did Iran do it or were they framed? Is her more celebrated diplomat of a husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) interfering with her job? Is this position an audition for something larger?

Creator and showrunner Deborah Cahn wrote on more episodes of “The West Wing” than anyone who wasn’t Aaron Sorkin. She also had a long stint on “Homeland”. Her expertise in this kind of storytelling shines, with thick but accessible political dialogue, believable international intrigue, and lightning fast banter where no word or meaning gets lost. Rarely do actors get writing this good, and it allows them in turn to perform both the large moments and the subtle ones.

The Bear

(FX, Hulu) The first season of Carmy trying to save his late brother’s Italian beef sandwich shop captured chaos in a way that was overwhelming in its precision. It found moments of beauty in collapse and moments of horror in accomplishment. It often felt poignantly real, while capturing the essence of Chicago in a way no other series has.

The second season eases up ever so slightly as Carmy tries to built a destination restaurant in its place, taking on more debt and facing even more obstacles. Yet with extra episodes and just the hint of a gentler pace, “The Bear” finds more time to delve into characters and their hopes the way it delved into their workplace and their traumas in the first season.

The ensemble remains the best one going, anchored by Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Liza Colon-Zayas, and now giving us more time with Lionel Boyce and Abby Elliott. That portrayal of chaos is still here, but now you’ve got characters working toward something more than just making it to the next day. That helps “The Bear” evolve its strengths without losing what makes it unique.

Am I Being Unreasonable?

(Hulu) Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli showrun, write, and perform a comedy about mothers who are stuck in life. Or is it a thriller about a long-kept secret? Or perhaps a show where one has faked her past and is stalking the other? Or a show where one is trying to rescue the other? “Am I Being Unreasonable?” morphs from one genre to another in ways that ask us to constantly see its characters from new angles

“Am I Being Unreasonable?” encourages us to keep making assumptions, to keep repeating first impressions. It evokes bias and warning, pairs revulsion with admiration in ways that confuse and highlight just what jerks we are as viewers. It offers endless reasons to reject someone or embrace them before we understand enough to know either. Its plot evolutions make us turn back on our own assumptions in ways that force us to confront how harmfully we use those assumptions in real life.

Sugar Apple Fairy Tale

(Crunchyroll) If you know your anime, this choice might seem very weird. At first glance, “Sugar Apple Fairy Tale” appears far simpler and more straightforward than cinematic standouts like “Demon Slayer”, “Hell’s Paradise”, “Insomniacs After School”, and “My Love Story with Yamada-kun”. It’s just an uncomplicated story about a sugar glass artist traveling to compete in a fantasy kingdom, right?

Piece by piece, “Sugar Apple Fairy Tale” builds a world that depends on the systemic dismissal of women, that paints racism and slavery as a method for those disempowered women to emulate the patriarchal power that holds them down by oppressing others. Its chaste romance uses what’s familiar to point power dynamics at each other – a girl with an undying supernatural partner, a former slave with the girl who briefly owned and freed him.

Having worked with people who have been stalked, “Sugar Apple Fairy Tale” conveys how stalkers enlist other men and male systems to steal from, de-legitimize, and isolate women. It does this as pointedly as anything I’ve seen – it possesses deeply frustrating moments…and yet it still sees our hero endure through it all. She creates as an artist regardless of circumstance, and relentlessly re-ignites her own agency. Though limited by its budget, the series is expansive in scope and imagination. I keep comparing it to “The Last Unicorn” because it combines astounding social commentary with deep understanding of its characters’ internal lives, and its world feels inhabited by hope even under the threat of the nostalgic hate of those in power.

Beef

(Netflix) A road-rage incident pits Steven Yeun’s struggling repairman against Ali Wong’s workaholic business owner. Each escalates their vengeance from pranks to stalking and harm, putting those around them at risk. That seems like a repulsive concept – why would you want to watch that? Yet through it all, the door opens onto how each feels alone and overwhelmed, nearly connecting with someone only to sabotage it, repeating cycles of abuse and self-hatred they’ve tried to disguise in a world that rewards the similar disguises of con men and manipulators.

The dark comedy plays out multiple jokes simultaneously, and despite the characters’ viciousness to each other, rarely at their expense. The show dives deep into absurdism but does an excellent job at hiding this within the comedy…until it comes time to connect the absurd into a shockingly metaphysical conversation about trauma and empathy. That late left turn makes it divisive, but if you can let it carry you where it wants to go, “Beef” might be the most rewarding and thoughtful show of the year.

Abbott Elementary

(ABC, Hulu) The mockumentary about teachers at a Philadelphia elementary school was already funny, poignant, and confident in its first season. The second simply has an outstanding foundation to build on and refines what already works. It feels more consistent – and unlike many sitcoms, its thoughtfulness encourages even more comedy.

What sets “Abbott Elementary” apart from prior mockumentary sitcoms like “The Office” and “Modern Family” is that its comedy isn’t based on judgment and failure to adhere to norms. It’s closer to “Parks and Rec”, where we’re not laughing at these people but rather rooting for them to succeed. They’re funny because they’re funny, not because they’ve embarrassed themselves or because they’re being judged or acting pitiable. They’re on each others’ side rather than tearing each other down.

That asks a lot more of the writers. “Abbott Elementary” engages social issues like the demands made on teachers and the threat of charter school takeovers. It also enters the will-they/won’t-they romantic territory that a sitcom like this often explores – yet with a complex lens that treats the question as something more than a yes-no toggle.

“Abbott Elementary” remains the best thing on network TV a second year running.

Bloodhounds

(Netflix) The Korean action series takes place during the height of COVID, as loan companies made predatory offers to empty, struggling businesses. Geon-woo’s mother falls prey to one of these loans and her cafe is ransacked as a warning. He’s joined by boxing partner Woo-jin in protecting a woman investigating these crimes.

Sometimes that means following and observing a target, and sometimes it means facing off against enforcers in the dozens. “Bloodhounds” has an argument as the best action series since 2021’s “My Name”, featuring exquisitely precise fight choreography in the midst of tumultuous battles that sometimes number 3-on-30. This wouldn’t mean anything without a point, but “Bloodhounds” burrows deep into how loan companies trick people and pay off the system enough to get away with it.

The series is surprisingly emotional – this isn’t something you get through without some brutal loss, but none of it feels gimmicky. It’s all earned, and it contains some shocking and realistic moments of desperation. It also features the bromance to end all bromances, a touching and beautifully acted friendship between the very different Geon-woo and Woo-jin.

Skip and Loafer

(Crunchyroll) Mitsumi is a girl from the country. She transfers to an elite Tokyo high school in the hopes of getting onto a political track in college. She works hard to set herself up for success, but early missteps only exacerbate her fears that everyone will view her as a country bumpkin. Luckily, her first friend is a popular boy named Sosuke, who’s endlessly supportive.

This doesn’t go the way you think. As driven and anxious as Mitsumi is, she’s relentlessly hopeful. Her desire to enter politics is to make things better for her oft-forgotten community back home. Meanwhile, the admired and seemingly easygoing Sosuke harbors a private isolation and depression. Both help each other by being someone the other can feel safe around and open up to.

The pastel-adjacent animation is beautiful and often filled with subtle character detail. There’s a sense of acting in how characters are animated that embodies great performance, and Deai Kotomi’s direction can give an awkward pause the weight of the world when she wants. An episode where Mitsumi goes home for break stands as one of the most beautiful things I’ll see this year. There’s powerful art here – an airplane taking off through cloud capturing the break from one reality to another; sitting at a table eating watermelon by the seaside an exercise in tranquility. Mitsumi’s inner peace is a marvel, her anxiety a product of determination. Sosuke’s turmoil is privately held, something he won’t burden anyone else with but that he’s beginning to understand better.

Then there’s Aunt Nao, one of the best trans characters I’ve seen portrayed because the series simply treats her as a professional who in her private life is kind and caring, protective and supportive of a niece who’s protective and supportive of her in turn.

So many relationships here are beautiful to witness, and each in a different way that requires its own understanding, its own protection and support.

The Last of Us

(Max, aka HBO Max) “The Last of Us” is one of the most harrowing series you’ll ever see, defined by moments to make you go quiet. When I think of Kansas City and “I’m sorry”, I could hear a pin drop. “Long, Long Time” is a poetry of heartache. There is so much terror and loss of hope in “The Last of Us”, which is why I’m often not a fan of post-apocalypse stories. Yet there’s also a resurgent current of humanity here, of internal resistance to despair and the undeniable nature of connection.

As the world has warmed, fungus that can control animals with colder internal temperatures evolves. What couldn’t live in humans now does, and a single strain in a single supply of flour that’s shipped the world over collapses everything. There’s horror in the face-offs against grotesque, fungus-sprouted humans that don’t move quite as humans do, but there’s also a pervading sorrow. Every scene of sneaking past something horrific or fighting it outright is also a lamentation of human failure.

This might not work in the hands of a lesser cast, but we all know what Pedro Pascal can do by now, how emotive his body can be, how as Joel he can freeze his face in unfeeling stone only for a shaking thumb at the corner of the frame to betray him. It’s a wonder then that he’s out-acted here by Bella Ramsey as Ellie, the girl he’s tasked to protect. In some ways she’s just a teenager, prone to rebellion and bad jokes. In others, she’s a child raised in a fascist post-apocalypse society, exposed to violence enough to be deeply curious about it, to envision the passage to adulthood as the mastery of violence, to probably – and unfortunately – be right about this, but with a moral compass new enough to still resist erosion. She’s the acid to Joel’s base, and you begin to see how that changes and saves them both.

With a cast that includes moving performances by the likes of Anna Torv, Lamar Johnson, and Melanie Lynskey, and jaw-dropping storytelling of human endurance in the face of hubristic collapse, “The Last of Us” joins “Arcane” as proof that video game adaptations never needed to be simplified – they needed appreciation for their complexity and the unique way they investigate agency within storytelling.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House

(Netflix) Two girls in Japan set out to become geisha performers, who practice their art on a daily basis and live in a house with other performers. Sumire exceeds expectations and her potential is recognized as once-in-a-generation. Her best friend Kiyo washes out. She can’t even master the simple steps of rhythm and choreography. She falls behind to the point where they can’t keep her in the house anymore.

One day, with the house’s usual chef recovering from an injury, Kiyo starts cooking for them. It’s a rousing success and, with the other chef ready to hand the position over, Kiyo remains living there under her new role.

You could argue “The Makanai” lacks dire stakes or complex tragedy because – even within its unique setting of geisha performance, it’s about pretty normal people living pretty normal lives. But this would be to say that ordinary people have no true stakes in their lives and endure no tragedy. What “The Makanai” finds is peace within the complexity we all endure and can readily recognize. It’s not simpler for recognizing this because making this level of storytelling and stakes compelling – often without direct plot conflict – requires a complex understanding of what makes each of us tick.

“That girl is meant to make things instead of being made into something”. Their friend’s grandmother says this about Kiyo at one point and it perfectly captures the essence of the series. It explores two ways of pursuing art. In Sumire’s fashion, you learn the skills of others and are molded by the community around you. In Kiyo’s fashion, you offer your skills to others to take part in molding that community. Sumire evokes what’s personal from within perfection of her art form, Kiyo sees her art form from within perfection of what’s personal. They’re both right, they’re both awe-inspiring artists, they’re just different.

It’s this sense of understanding how two people can grow, can move people daily with their art despite such different approaches to it, such different work behind it, that makes “The Makanai” so unique. We make shows about so many things, but often forget about gentleness. A show where every action feels real, important, every moment inhabited, where even the act of hanging laundry or cooking is art…it reminds us that these can be art in our real lives. It reminds us we don’t culturally appreciate those who tend to be tasked with it and make art of that work day after day.

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