My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2023

For the uninitiated, it's a yearly tradition for me to start this list by breaking down my relationship to television, counting how many TV shows I watched in full during the calendar year.  In 2023, I had a healthy amount of 87, so the days of watching over 100 shows in a year are long in the rearview now.  One difference here is I got so behind on TV that there were some shows I really wanted to get in under the wire that I didn't have time for.  There are always things that I miss out on, but they're usually more of a "I'm mildly intrigued to check this out" case.  This time, there are some heavy hitters that I just didn't get around to.  Hell, there was a new season of Black Mirror in 2023 and I still haven't watched it.

So now more than ever, this top 20 you're about to see is not necessarily definitive, just my favorites of what I managed to cross off my watch list.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on their episodes that aired between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.  This used to be a big thing when people watched more network shows where the seasons bled into the new year, but it doesn't factor in as much.  Although this year some shows like The Curse, For All Mankind, and Fargo are doing this annoying thing where almost all of the season aired this year but then the last two episodes are going to bleed into 2024.  That's stupid!  I hate it!

My 50 Favorite Television Shows of the Decade: 2010-2019

There was a problem facing television as a medium in the 2010s, and if you've been online or reading my year-end lists then you know what I'm talking about: there's too much damn TV.  It's been an outright epidemic over the last 10 years, with new shows and delivery systems for those shows popping up at a rapid rate, far past anyone's ability to keep up with it all.  Somebody once aptly described a TV critic's role as being more like a book critic's nowadays -- there's too much for one person to consume, so you have to make peace with that and curate your experience by finding a niche.

Unfortunately, the influx of TV also led to more bad shows.  The rise of streaming and binge-watching has caused series to indulge in being nothing more than formless pieces of content.  Sometimes it can feel like every writer who knows how to construct seasons, episodes, and even scenes died near the end of the previous decade.  But the sheer magnitude of television in this decade means that there was still alot to love about television.  This list chronicles the best of the best from the 2010s.

The rules: These eligibility rules are slightly more complicated than the ones for the other two lists, so read carefully.  In order for a show to be eligible for this list, it has to have aired more than half of its total episodes within this decade.  Also, only those episodes that aired in this decade are taken into consideration when placing and ranking that show.  For example: 30 Rock is eligible for consideration because 72 of its 138 episodes aired after January 1, 2010 -- that's 52% for all the mathematicians out there -- but the only episodes that determine if it can make the top 50 are Season 4 Episode 9 through Season 7 Episode 13 (the episodes that aired in the 2010s).  Also, only continuing series are eligible for the top 50, while miniseries get their own mini list.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2015

90% of every best TV of the year feature makes some mention of "Peak TV," a term coined by FX president John Landgraf to explain the current overabundance of not just television shows, but quality television shows.  Even I've introduced at least three of my pieces this year by talking about this concept.  It's an annoying term, especially given its ubiquity, but it's also useful to describe today's landscape.  For obsessive completionists like myself, there's just too much TV.  The total number of shows I watched regularly in 2015 was a whopping 125, spread across 36 different networks.  Trust me, it's as exhausting as it sounds.

But this so-called state of Peak TV has also led to an interesting niche-ification of television.  Just a decade ago, there were 10 or 15 shows that almost everyone could agree upon as "the best shows on television."  And they usually boiled down to only a couple types of shows.  Now, great TV comes in all shapes and sizes.  So if you don't like that show all the critics are currently obsessing over, there are 50 more for you to try out.

For example, I don't like Bojack Horseman very much.  Critics are in love with it and think that it's an honest depiction of depression, when I find all of its emotional beats to be extremely hollow.  Season two of Transparent, which has a 93 on Metacritic, was a bit of a mess if you ask me.  Fargo, the show everyone won't shut up about being the best thing they've seen on television in a long time?  Kind of overrated!  And even still, there is an endless supply of shows that I loved, as you'll see from my list.  What a time to be alive.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes they aired in 2015.  This is a pretty plain and simple rule for cable dramas, where full seasons usually air within a single calendar year.  However, it gets slightly messy when considering network shows, which usually air the first half of their season in the fall and the second half starting January of the next year.  So something like, say, Fresh Off the Boat would be judged based on the second half of its first season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its second season (which started in the fall of this year).  As for what constitutes a TV show, anything that airs on, you know, a TV station counts.  But shows that air exclusively on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon count too.  Okay, everything clear now?  Good, let's get this list started...

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2013

Are you sick of hearing about whether or not we're in the golden age of television?  There has been alot of hand-wringing about that lately, spurred on by the fact that 2013 was an unequivocally great year for TV, the best that I've seen since I started following the medium closely.  Not only was the year remarkable for its depth of quality, but also for its breadth.  Good television has been popping up from every corner, with networks like Sundance making their debut in original programming and online sources like Hulu and Netflix expanding their market.  One of the shows in end of the year discussion, Borgen, released episodes on LinkTV -- whatever that is!  It's interesting to think that a little over a decade ago, most of the talked about TV shows came from the big four networks (CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC) and HBO.  Now I literally get anxiety thinking about all of the great television coming from so many different places that I'll never get around to watching.  (For how much TV I already watch, see the full list linked to at the bottom of this post.)

Television lists are harder than music and film lists to do, because the main television season is spread out over two calendar years, with many shows starting their seasons in September and not ending until April or May.  This is becoming less of an issue, as summer is seen as a television ghetto less and less every year, and cable shows tend to air their entire seasons in a single calendar year.  Nevertheless, for each television show, the only episodes eligible for ranking purposes are the ones that aired in 2013.  That seems like an obvious thing, but it always throws some people.  This can sometimes work to a show's advantage.  For example, Parenthood was very high on my list last year because it aired all of its best material (the end of season 3 at the beginning of year, the beginning of season 4 in the fall) in 2012.  On the other hand, New Girl was never going to land in my top 20 this year, but it ended up being way further down on my full list because its third season has been so terrible, it's tarnished the quality of the back half of season 2 that aired at the beginning of the year.  Is all of that clear?  Okay, good.

For all of my talk about the breadth of the television landscape, my top 20 consists of a small cluster of networks, but there are still some unexpected ones.  The list heavily favors cable to network, with 16 belonging to the former and 2 belonging to the latter (and 2 coming from internet-only sources).  My top 20 is also low on straight comedies, consisting of mostly dramas and shows that are listed as "comedy" but are mostly dramatic.  This is mainly because of how good this year was for drama, but it also was a very weak year for comedy, particular network comedies.  So enough analysis of the list, let's move on to the actual thing...

Justified's Rich History is Its Greatest Weapon

In order to sustain a multi-season show with a serialized narrative, you must always be expanding the world. If not, you risk the story becoming stagnant or, even worse, running out of stories to tell altogether.  The way that most shows go about this is that they expand "outward."  Gradually throughout the seasons, new characters are introduced, old ones are jettisoned, and new areas of the setting are developed.  By nature, plot moves forward, and so too does the world of a show.  Even on a show like Lost, which in its early seasons was contained to a single island, found new aspects of the island to explore.  It's not so much that the old features of the island were gone as much as the way that we thought of the island was changed.

Over the course of three and a half seasons, Justified has fleshed out Harlan County into this living, breathing entity.  Just like we would imagine any rural southern county in reality to be, Harlan is full of intricacies, from its various factions and their myriad feuds between one another to its old urban legends.  All of the major players on the show come with their own past connections with everybody else, dating back years and sometimes generations.  It wasn't until last night's episode that it really clicked for me, but the way that Justified progresses is that it expands its world "backwards."  Every episode, it seems like we gain a little insight into the past of Harlan and its citizens, through a funny little anecdote or reminiscence about an old squabble.  Watching Justified can often feel like you're only getting a glimpse into 1% of these people's lives.  Ties run deep in Harlan, and with every new detail, those ties come into sharper focus.

In that way, the show Justified is most similar to is my favorite show of all time, The Sopranos, where tales of "the old days" were doled out more frequently than wackings.  On both shows, knowing about the pasts of the characters are essential to defining how they are in the present -- why they are so damaged, distant, and duplicitous.  Perhaps the reason why both of these shows are able to expand backwards the way that they do is because the process is so thematically tied to the shows' foundations.  The Sopranos is all about being haunted by an imagined past, one that may not be exactly what existed, but is close enough to inform the reality of the present.  Justified, with all its concerns about familial ties and the difficulties of escaping ensconced labels and habits, equally lends itself to constantly reminding us of the past and uncovering more facets of it.

I thought about this alot earlier today when I was watching Angel, as a part of my continuing obsession with Joss Whedon.  One of the episodes I watched was season 3's, "Double or Nothing."  It's a frustrating episode, because it's the type of momentum staller that seasons of Whedon shows usually have around episode 18, when they realize that there's still time to kill before the finale.  However, it's even more problematic because the main plotline revolves around learning something about Gunn that happened 7 years in the past.  An argument can be made that because Angel, the show's main character, is constantly dealing with the bad things he did in his past, that it's fair game to spring a random detail about a secondary character on the audience with no warning.  Unfortunately, the execution of it in "Double or Nothing" just feels clunky.  Because we have very little basis for Gunn's past life, suddenly learning something that is so crucial to driving the plot of the episode just doesn't feel right.  On a show like Justified, when we're introduced to a new element from the past, it feels like a natural addition to the tapestry that is the history of Harlan.

These well-established backstories can lead to some problems as well, primarily when a new detail gets introduced and it doesn't gel with what we already know.  Fans of The Sopranos might've had a problem with season 5's introduction of Tony B. (played by Steve Buscemi), Tony Soprano's childhood best friend who'd spent the past few years in jail, yet the show never made any mention of him in the previous 4 seasons.  (Of course, it's easier to roll with since The Sopranos was famous for introducing characters and pretending they'd been there all along).  With something like the introduction of Noble's Hollow in season 3 of Justified, it makes sense that we wouldn't hear about that side of town until it was completely necessary, given the racial divide that still exists within Harlan.  On the other hand, the big reveal of last night's episode isn't sitting well with some, who find that it doesn't map out correctly with the rules of the past that Justified has so thoroughly established.

This meticulous attention to the past is the vein from which Graham Yost and the writing staff of Justified draw much of the conflict each season.  Their rich histories give each character on the show a sense of community; one that constantly seems to find itself at odds with outsiders of some kind.  Season 4 in particular has been leaning heavily on the past to inform the present -- in fact, the main mystery this year revolves around something that happened over 30 years ago.  Despite, or perhaps because of, the distant memory of this event, all of Harlan County is thrust into action by old feuds and transgressions revisiting.  Who knows whether the fraught past of these characters will lead to a grim and short future, but it's responsible for a rollicking and tense season of television.