Once upon a time, television told stories about intelligent machines that take over the world and algorithms that prevent people from making their own choices, and it felt like distant, fanciful science fiction. This year, as actors and writers remained on strike for half a year — in part over the threat artificial intelligence poses to human artistry and the opaque algorithm that dictates which streaming shows and movies get placed in front of which eyeballs — this same kind of storytelling felt a little more present than future tense. And there was a fair amount of it in 2023, some great, some not so great; some made by streaming platforms most likely to succumb to the machines, others developed through traditional cable platforms most likely to rage against them. If there’s anything we can take away from our most recent season of list-making, it’s that a kind of technological anxiety loomed over our picks for the best television of 2023. And that after years of optimism or at the very least openness to a sparkling new future of streaming TV, the best of the best demonstrate the past is not totally behind us.
Year in Culture
Kathryn VanArendonk: TV in 2023 was all about the algorithm, a natural next step for a medium with a long history of making shows about itself. We used to have The Dick Van Dyke Show and Murphy Brown and Sports Night and 30 Rock; now we have an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror where the premise is that Netflix uses AI to scrape the lives of its viewers, turns that data into barely fictionalized Netflix shows, and then algorithmically serves the show back to those viewers like a form of content-based Soylent Green.
Looking back on the year’s TV output as a whole, it’s hard not to be distracted by the multiple shows explicitly about algorithmic catastrophe, including FX’s Class of ’09 and A Murder at the End of the World and, of course, Mrs. Davis on Peacock. That Black Mirror episode is the most on-the-nose expression of 2023’s unavoidable theme, but my favorite AI/algorithm/end-of-the-world show this year was Mrs. Davis, about a nun, played by Betty Gilpin, who makes it her life’s mission to destroy a seemingly friendly gamified philanthropy app that she realizes is trying to take over the world. Jen, I know Mrs. Davis also made it on to your top-ten list this year.
Jen Chaney: Mrs. Davis — which premiered the month before the strikes began — has only felt more relevant as 2023 has progressed. Gilpin’s Sister Simone makes a deal with Mrs. Davis, the name of the all-knowing Siri-esque bot you mentioned, who says that if Simone is able to find the Holy Grail, the AI overlord will delete herself permanently. That premise places concerns about technological control in an existential, religious quagmire that makes it clear the people working within the television industry as well as TV viewers are all preoccupied with similarly interconnected questions. We’re all wondering whether we are slowly surrendering our sense of free will to entities that undervalue human expression. (These entities include AI but also David Zaslav.)
Shows like Mrs. Davis double down on the idea that much of technology cannot be trusted, but the ending of Mrs. Davis, which I will not spoil since it provides one of the great TV pleasures of 2023, goes a step further and suggests that the sophisticated systems running the world are, in some cases, rooted in a stupidity you can only either laugh at or beat your head against. Because of the general AI panic in the air, the Hollywood strikes, shows getting unceremoniously removed from streamers, and others getting canceled altogether (good-bye, Gossip Girl and How I Met Your Father and Perry Mason and — *has sudden, intense coughing* — The Idol), the state of television in general felt as unpredictable as an episode of Mrs. Davis. Would we get a real fall TV season, we wondered when the WGA strike began? We would not! Is the Peak TV era over? Probably! Does that mean the promise streaming initially offered — more opportunities for risk-taking and representation of fresh voices — is dead? Hope not but also [insert shrug emoji]. To refer to another one of my favorites from 2023: The Bear said chaos menu and television responded accordingly.
Roxana Hadadi: I wasn’t as much of a Mrs. Davis–head — I have not earned my wings yet — but it certainly kicked off a trend that made itself clear as we deliberated over the year’s best (and less great) shows. There were the unattractively conceptualized opening credits of Secret Invasion, which were designed by Method Studios using AI and fit with how by-the-numbers the series’ plotting was. The year ended with the very good A Murder at the End of the World, which made it onto my top ten-list and pondered what happens when we hand over control, and biases, to beings that we train. The FX miniseries Class of ’09 explored similar themes, but I think I was the only person who watched it.
The mini-boom of sci-fi TV over the last decade or so has primed us to worry, with the likes of Mr. Robot and Westworld increasing our paranoia about what we misunderstand about the tech we use every day. But there was a specifically grave tone to the series this year that really felt like TV creators trying to work something out, and trying to prove their own worth. And given that the industry’s use of AI and algorithms was a major issue in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes this year, I get the urgency. Think of how Hulu and Max followed in Netflix’s footsteps by adding their own confusingly engineered top-ten-viewed categories to their home screens. With these lists, my question is always whether they’re populated by what people are actually watching, or by what the streaming services’ algorithms want us to watch.
KVA: Another promise of the streaming algorithm was that it would destroy the demand for traditional network and cable-style programming. There’s no need to appeal to everyone when a Netflix algorithm can funnel a show to exactly the audience who would actually want it. After several years of intense skepticism, 2023 has also felt like the year that algorithmic failure became undeniable. Just as Google results feel unusable and Amazon works like an avalanche of garbage products, streaming algorithms have failed to create the kind of curiosity and interest for new and returning programming that more traditional promotional campaigns used to accomplish.
Minx, for example, a streaming show canceled by Max after apparently failing to find a sufficient audience, was picked up for a second season by the cable outlet Starz. It’s become clear that one of the promises of streaming — whatever you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it — is no longer true. Instead, TV this year has given us opportunities to remember why cable programming was and still is a pretty good idea.
JC: Look at the rest of our individual top-ten lists. At the top are shows that, while streaming, could not exist without the infrastructure of cable television. Succession streamed on Max and many people watched it there, but it was developed by and aired on HBO. Reservation Dogs and The Bear both streamed exclusively on Hulu, but they were FX productions that bore all the hallmarks of excellence that have been typical of that basic-cable platform for two decades. As Hollywood gets back to work following the strikes, it feels like TV is still reaching for what is “next.†But it’s very possible that what’s next is a world with fewer streamers and a turn toward more conventional approaches to television — rolling out shows week to week like HBO continues to do; airing already-familiar shows (in the old days we called them reruns) like Yellowstone on CBS or, as just announced for January, Only Murders in the Building on ABC. In a lot of ways, these cross-platform programming decisions double as ads for the networks’ sister streamers, which makes one wonder why they didn’t start doing this sooner.
RH: Look at how many of streaming’s original, odd, almost niche series got canceled — even just on Max, like the sci-fi Raised by Wolves, the voguing reality competition Legendary, and the LGBTQ+ teen dramedy Genera+ion. Even shows that had devoted audiences, like Netflix’s mysterious time-travel series 1899 and Prime Video’s A League of Their Own, couldn’t survive past a first season. Dozens of new and original series have been canceled, while there’s been an increase in IP-reboot announcements. I’m not sure who is asking for a Harry Potter series at this point, but we’re getting it.
In my mind, Reservation Dogs pulled off the narrative audaciousness of what streamers were meant to offer while doing something equally effective — maintaining the hallmarks of broadcast TV Jen mentioned: clear, seasonlong arcs; strong episodic structure; and a distinct sense of time and place. Still, I must admit that some of my favorite series this year were streaming works I cannot imagine watching on “regular†TV. See: Full Circle’s mixture of surveillance-style visuals and misguided mysticism, and Boots Riley’s capitalism-excoriating and practical-effects-filled I’m a Virgo.
KVA: I’m a Virgo is also on my list, and although I do think it’s the kind of thing that could still play on one of the premium cable channels, it belongs to a dwindling corner of streaming platforms where weird, even radical TV gets made — it begins from a fairy-tale premise that’s already primed to be a fable about race, with a Black boy who’s born a giant and then hidden by his relatives who fear the world will view him as a threat. From there the critique of capitalism and corporate conservatism gets more intensely beautiful and strange. It’s a little hard to believe no one at Prime Video flagged it for sheer cognitive dissonance. (Between I’m a Virgo, The Boys, and its striking new spinoff this year, Gen V, Prime seems curiously prone to this kind of programming. Maybe the lesson is that capitalism is happy to sell us its own most devastating critiques as long as we’re willing to buy them.)
Several of the other shows on my list this year are TV series so delightfully old school that they feel antediluvian: Deadloch, a buddy cop show from Australia that, yes, is steeped in modern politics, but at its core is built on some rock-solid first principles of British TV (two cops, small town, escalating danger, red herrings, it’s the whole bit). Similarly, season two of HBO’s lamentably canceled Perry Mason, which finally figured out how to nail California noir only to be axed for, presumably, costing way too much money while Matthew Rhys puttered around on a tiny period-appropriate motorbike. But I’m not so ostrich-in-the-sand that I can’t also embrace what only streaming has figured out how to provide. There’s no more streaming-native series than Netflix’s Love Is Blind, which had not one but two standout seasons this year, and which does feel like it’s reaching for the pinnacle of the unscripted genre.
JC: When it wants to, Netflix can still produce a thought-provoking drama that gets everyone talking. Beef, which is on my list, was exactly that, an incredibly tense illustration of how minor disagreements can escalate in America’s increasingly hostile culture, a timely narrative elevated by constantly surprising performances from its two leads, Ali Wong and Steven Yuen. Characters who become lit up with anger when the world fails them was a bit of a running thread among my selections; Beef, Barry, and Succession all focused on individuals who allowed resentment to eat them alive. The latest season of Fargo, which I did not include primarily because we haven’t received all the episodes yet, is an even more pointed example of this.
Yet several of my choices were also about people dealing with challenges and finding ways to persevere. Somebody, Somewhere; Reservation Dogs; The Other Two; The Bear; Party Down. These are all very different shows, but each elicited feelings of joy and optimism — pathetic optimism in Party Down’s case — without glossing over pain. Which is something that your average broadcast show or unimaginative reboot doesn’t necessarily muster on the regular. Wherever TV goes in 2024, I hope it doesn’t lose sight of how valuable those sorts of stories are.