If you watched any television in 2023, you know that this year’s TV climate was all about sacrifices. There is no possible way that any of us can keep up with the amount of new shows coming out anymore; even lamenting the overwhelming volume of television in casual conversation has grown dull. “Ugh, there’s so much TV!” has become as common a refrain as talking about the weather. Parties and family gatherings are better spent firing off what series we love, lest anyone miss out on something good.
Keeping up with TV is a statistical impossibility, one that demands that we carefully siphon what little free time we do have into the things we enjoy. The minutes are precious, if something can’t hold our attention, better to let it go completely than drag our feet to the finish line. There can even be a twisted satisfaction in watching something that we secretly weren’t loving fall down the “keep watching” tab of our favorite streamer.
Luckily, 2023 was a banner year for television, with sublime new seasons and limited series so consistent that they kept us hanging on every frame until the last episode. The latest seasons of What We Do In the Shadows and I Think You Should Leave showed us all of the ways that outlandish, observational satires are leading the pack when it comes to the modern water cooler conversation. The Bear and Somebody Somewhere followed up their phenomenal freshman seasons with a slew of episodes that cemented their status as two of the best, most emotionally resonant shows on television. And then there were the wild and gloriously wacky series, like The Curse and Luann and Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake, that kept surprising us every time we thought we had them pegged.
It was also a year that we said goodbye to some heavy hitters. Succession, Barry, and The Other Two all bowed with a final (fantastic) season. In the year that HBO Max became just Max, losing these terrific shows all on the same platform felt like a tipping point, an indication that the streaming bubble might be heading for a sharp surface.
It’s our job to bring all of these great things to your attention, and it’s one that we take seriously. But we also value the shows that aren’t nail-biting dramas or emotional baseball bats to the heart. In all honesty, sometimes the things that have the most profound impact are the most lighthearted, silly shows, the ones that make life’s most mundane days a little more bearable. That balance between levity and the ultra-passionate fixation that turns into can’t-miss television is what we’re all about here at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. And though we, too, must make the occasional sacrifice when it comes to figuring out what to watch, we’ve teamed up to curate the best of the year so you won’t have to forgo anything else. —Coleman Spilde
Barry
Now streaming on Max
Of all the shows to air their final seasons this year, the one I’ll miss the most is Barry. What began as a dark comedy about a hitman who wanted to be an actor evolved into something deeper, stranger, more tragic: a portrait of several deeply selfish people on single-minded quests for survival, to disastrous ends. We all knew where this was going to end up—did you really think Barry Berkman could get away with all of this alive?—but the “how” of it was consistently exciting. With co-creator/star Bill Hader at the helm for each episode, the fourth and final season mixed thriller, comedy, horror, and family drama into something breathtakingly original. I’ll miss it dearly, even if my doctor is pleased that my heart rate no longer spikes every Sunday. —Allegra Frank
The Bear
Now streaming on Hulu
The major talking point about The Bear Season 1 was how stressful it was. That certainly continued in its second season, but it was accompanied by a critical, elevating note: It was soulful, too. The jack-hammer intensity of launching a new restaurant in an everything-that-could-go-wrong-does industry was relentless, but it was the moments of exhale, even of pain, that rooted this season. Ayo Edebiri and especially Abby Elliott brought an energy that complicated a show that would have easily run to accolades if it kept the same franticness of its freshman outing, while standalone episodes featuring Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Lionel Boyce were stunning character studies. And, especially given the time of year we’re writing this, we’d be remiss not to shout out that brilliant, if traumatizing, Christmas episode featuring Jamie Lee Curtis. —Kevin Fallon
The Curse
Now streaming on Paramount+
One expects a Nathan Fielder show to be strange. We welcome it, especially after Fielder’s last project, The Rehearsal, left viewers staggered by continually pulling the rug out from under their expectations. Fielder does it again with The Curse, a nerve-shredding limited series experience and the closest thing that we’ve had to a new David Lynch/Mark Frost project since Twin Peaks: The Return. The show, co-created and starring Fielder and Benny Safdie, also stars Emma Stone as Whitney, one-half of a guileless couple of aspiring HGTV hosts, alongside Fielder’s Asher. Whitney and Asher are creating an empire of eco-friendly passive homes that are encroaching on the community of Española, New Mexico. The duo is both completely oblivious to their type of modern colonization and unapologetic about the lengths they’ll go to to achieve their dream. As the show dips in and out of stomach-churning, comical surrealism, things only become more dire for the couple. Every decision has a ripple of effect, and even the most low-stakes choices feel like life or death. It’s unexpectedly edge-of-your-seat television, the kind that only Fielder and his talented, committed collaborators could conjure up. —C.S.
Dead Ringers
Now streaming on Prime Video
Those familiar with David Cronenberg’s 1988 film Dead Ringers might’ve thought that there was nothing new to extract from this story of sicko twins who open their own gynecology practice. Not so, it turns out! It’s not just the gender-swapped selling point that makes Prime Video’s Dead Ringers limited series such a knockout—though star Rachel Weisz’s pair of uncanny dual performances are can’t-miss. This version of the story probes deeper, burrowing into the psychology of womanhood and the relationship to one’s biological state. It’s also got some of the most searing class commentary of any piece of media this year. —C.S.
Dreaming Whilst Black
Now streaming on Paramount+
Amid a wealth of fabulous, original comedy series, Dreaming Whilst Black stood out for its sheer amount of laugh-out-loud moments packed into a half hour. The series, which aired on Showtime by way of the BBC, follows an aspiring film director named Kwabena (Adjani Salmon), who toils through his dead-end job at a temp agency while juggling side gigs and a wealth of hysterical friends and industry connections to try to get his debut feature produced. Though it may seem formulaic, Dreaming Whilst Black livens up a familiar structure with pointed social satire that remarkably avoids feeling heavy-handed. —C.S.
Fellow Travelers
Now streaming on Paramount+
In an era of faux prestige television—filled with enough smoke and mirrors to recall the greats of the 2000s and 2010s but never living up to the gripping nature of HBO and AMC’s heyday— Fellow Travelers was the sweet, sexy reprieve we needed. The limited series, about two government men who navigate their torrential relationship through three decades of McCarthyism, war, bigotry, secrets, and plagues, generated just as many gasps as it did tears across its eight-episode run. Stars Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey did consistently Emmy-worthy work throughout the show’s tenure, but all of their highly erotic, no-cock-socks-barred sex scenes might’ve been more appropriate for the AVN awards. (A high compliment.) —C.S.
Full Circle
Now streaming on Max
A limited series directed by Steven Soderbergh and airing on HBO should not have flown as under the radar as it did, but all great art gets its due in time. The director’s latest thriller is breathless, never letting up for one moment as it stitches together its horrifying mystery that runs from small-time, blue-collar crime to full-scale political corruption. Claire Danes and Timothy Olyphant star as two wealthy New York parents whose son is kidnapped for ransom by a group with a mysterious connection to their family. This tragic event unleashes an avalanche of long-buried secrets, while a ticking clock stays silently counting down in the background of all the chaos. Full Circle is smart, sleek, and just as stylish as we’ve come to expect from a Soderbergh affair. —C.S.
The Horror of Dolores Roach
Now streaming on Prime Video
As a staunch rule, I try to avoid adaptations of podcasts. But for the great Dolores Roach, I’m willing to make an exception, especially if it means that I’m spared from being killed and fried inside of a delicious breaded pastry. Yes, The Horror of Dolores Roach is like Sweeney Todd in Washington Heights, but it’s so much more than a bit of cheeky cannibalism. Justina Machado’s brilliant turn as the titular killer Dolores is career-best work; Machado effortlessly waltzes between uproarious comedic timing and being fraught with anxiety over being caught, after an accidental murder gives way to a restaurant full of empanadas with a proprietary flavor. As Dolores, a woman wrongfully put away for years on a minor drug charge and to steer clear of police, Machado brings a grounded, lovable presence to this whip-smart series that tastes as good as it sounds. —C.S.
How to With John Wilson
Now streaming on Max
A show as idiosyncratic as this one was not meant to be long for this world. It’s a good thing, really, that John Wilson ended his unique docuseries about the strangest corners of our country before someone else could pull the plug (here’s lookin’ at you, Zaslav!). Wilson made sure that he got to utter his final “Hey, New York” on his own terms, weaving together a third, final season that’s at once his most personal and his most expansive. From a deep dive into the city’s rare public toilets to a peek behind the curtain at how he captures all of the unbelievable footage that comprises the show, How to With John Wilson left us with more than an unparalleled urban guidebook. It taught us to look at the world around us a little more closely. —A.F.
I Think You Should Leave
Now streaming on Netflix
I hope that every time Tim Robinson drops a new season of I Think You Should Leave, the greatest sketch comedy airing, Lorne Michaels gives himself a good ’ol kick in the pants. The one-time Saturday Night Live cast member has created something wholly original with this absolutely absurd series, whose 15-minute episodes blaze by in a flurry. Robinson mines humor out of the most ridiculous, inscrutable premises; in Season 3, we have: Someone gets a ride home from his coworker who moonlights as the “Driving Crooner;” a guy orders 55 of everything off a drive-thru menu and tries to get the person behind him to pay for it; a dude joins a Bachelorette-like dating show just so he can ride the villa’s zipline. These sketches are nonsensical, unpredictable, bizarre, and never not laugh-out-loud funny. Nothing on TV this year was as instantly rewatchable in its entirety as this one. —A.F.
Luann and Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake
Now streaming on Peacock
It takes a lot to be shocked by reality television these days, but in a year of Squid Game competitions and golden (fibbing) bachelors, there was no surprise more pleasant than Luann and Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake. The Bravo series saw RHONY alums Luann de Lesseps and Sonja Morgan take their bawdy best friendship to the little town of Benton, Illinois, best known for its crappie (that’s craw-pee) fishing and hometown values. Over six weeks and eight episodes, the dynamic duo turned building new playgrounds, putting on a city-wide talent show, repairing a local motel, trying on wild wigs, and passing gas in the parking of Dairy Queen into endlessly delightful slapstick fodder. What’s more, Sonja and Luann proved that they’re more than just former Housewives, or Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie knockoffs from The Simple Life—they’re vaudevillian talents that can make anything watchable, as long as there’s a camera involved. —C.S.
A Murder at the End of the World
Now streaming on Hulu
Creating a murder mystery that keeps viewers guessing until the very end—if they’re even willing to stick around that long—is a novel concept these days. But creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij are no strangers to this game as the minds behind Netflix’s beloved (and well-missed) The OA. A Murder at the End of the World’s seven-part whodunit brings the tech-forward foundation of that show to the frigid landscapes of Iceland, where sweeping on-location shots convey a chilling sense of isolation needed to keep a thriller this tense. As amateur sleuth and professional hacker Darby Hart, a compelling Emma Corrin matches the viewers’ curiosity. As bodies get cold and the walls close in, it’s impossible not to fall in love with this old-fashioned mystery for the modern age. —C.S.
The Other Two
Now streaming on Max
The final season of The Other Two took the show’s biting entertainment industry satire to terrifying new heights. Viewers watched siblings Brooke and Cary Dubek (Heléne York and Drew Tarver) weaponize their jealousy of their teenage brother’s viral fame into the most soulless, vapid Hollywood bloodsuckers since all of those guys on Entourage stopped yelling. Among staged Applebee’s dinners on studio backlots and lethally clever Ellen DeGeneres zingers, the show’s brilliant writers managed to strip back to the heart of the characters viewers hadn’t seen since they started selling their souls in Season 1, and ended the series on the kind of bittersweet note that only sharpest parodies can manage to nail so succinctly. —C.S.
Poker Face
Now streaming on Peacock
After Glass Onion failed to replicate the nifty excellence of Knives Out, hopes were middling for Rian Johnson’s immediate follow-up in the mystery genre. Luckily, the brilliantly charming Poker Face is exactly the kind of high-concept fare that Johnson does so well, stretched into a longer format to allow the series’ creator to be as quirky as can be. Along for the ride in that respect is Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a woman who talks plenty of shit but can smell your bullshit from a mile away, literally. Charlie is a human lie detector, and her inhuman talent makes plenty of enemies in this mystery-of-the-week caper that only gets more intense during its fantastic first season. —C.S.
Reservation Dogs
Now streaming on Hulu
This is a series that balanced heart and humor as well as it juggled the fantastical and the authentic, elegantly tip-toeing on a tonal pulse that brought every emotion you had to the surface—joyously. It is so important to celebrate the show’s portrayal of the Indigenous experience, brilliantly acted by an ace cast that proved how criminal it is that there are not more opportunities for performers from that community to tell their stories. But there is also something irresistibly universal to the struggles and joys inhabited by the show’s cast, even as the episodes danced effortlessly through different genres. This is a series that has had excellent word of mouth and, though this was its last season, I hope that whisper campaign continues, amplifying into a cheering rally. —K.F.
Scavengers Reign
Now streaming on Max
The year’s best sci-fi series was this gorgeously animated drama, which quietly premiered on Max this fall. Scavengers Reign’s Mœbius-inspired visuals were an immediate draw, distinguishing it from nearly any other show on television. Set in a dystopian future, the series is set on a gorgeously wrought planet: at times strange, at times verdant, at times horrifying, and always incredibly unique. But what really makes Scavengers Reign such a riveting watch is the character study at its center. The series follows four crew members of a downed spaceship, who try to survive as they venture back to the vessel. Through both heart-wrenching flashbacks and many near-death experiences, the series develops these lonely travelers’ relationships to each other, the world around them, and us, who come to gasp and cheer at each wrong and right step they make on their way home. Scavengers Reign is a show that wants us to believe in the good of humanity, without ignoring the worst—and with many grotesque alien creatures thrown into the proceedings for good measure. —A.F.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off
Now streaming on Netflix
Even if it didn’t turn out as well as it did, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off would still rank highly among TV’s most exciting accomplishments. Bringing back the entire cast of the cult-fave 2010 film? Recruiting one of the best animation studios in the business? Placing original author Bryan Lee O’Malley at the helm? It’s a fan’s dream, and one that came true beyond all expectations. Instead of simply adapting the source material yet again, Takes Off remixes and expands upon the original story in delightful, fantastical, hilarious fashion that works even for non-fans. In the world of Takes Off, for instance, it makes total sense that a woman would have an epic fight throughout myriad film scenes, then show up for work the next day as a stuntwoman on a biopic based upon the life of her missing maybe-boyfriend. There’s just nothing else quite like it. —A.F.
Somebody Somewhere
Now streaming on Max
One of the finest series of any year can rarely replicate its success in its sophomore season, let alone one that premieres just a little over a year after the first. But not every series is Somebody Somewhere, and that’s precisely what makes this tender comedy so wonderful: It’s one of television’s rare, true gems. In its second season, Somebody Somewhere continued to refine its delicate look at small-town life in Manhattan, Kansas, while exploring one of the show’s main themes, grief, in new and completely unexpected ways. Star Bridget Everett is nothing short of resplendent as she sings, bellows, cries, and cackles her way through the melancholic highs and lows of adulthood. Love and loss have never been so quite so beautifully compounded. —C.S.
Succession
Now streaming on Max
It’s wild when a season of a TV show arrives with almost impossible expectations for excellence, yet delivers above and beyond. To that end, Succession’s final season bordered on miraculous. The twisted power plays continued to delight with shock, without ever taking the leap to preposterous. And the show’s second-to-none cast excavated new layers to their characters that, against all odds, managed to humanize them even at their most monstrous. The production value of this series should be the example for all future prestige shows to follow. This is a rare case where, as much as I loved watching a series, I won’t miss it—the final season was so perfect, I wouldn’t want anything more. —K.F.
Swarm
Now streaming on Prime Video
One of 2023’s most inventive and consistently shocking shows was about Beyoncé. Well, not exactly Beyoncé, but a Queen Bey proxy named Ni’Jah, whom superstan Dre (Dominique Fishback) is vehemently obsessed with. Dre is a self-professed member of Ni’Jah’s fanbase, The Swarm (sound like anyone else’s you might know?), a group whose toxic mindset she becomes so entrenched in that it produces deadly results. Fishback’s endlessly layered performance is one of the very finest of the year, so fiercely committed and fearsome that it will leave a pit in your stomach as Dre embarks on a cross-country run from the law…and herself. —C.S.
Top Chef: World All Stars
Now streaming on Peacock
Top Chef has remained the standard bearer of reality competition series, evolving with the times while avoiding the genre’s traps of relying on gimmicks and spectacle to keep interest—well, except for one. This season was inherently a spectacle: The contestants were the winners and MVPs from Top Chef franchises all over the world, uniting for a global culinary adventure that led to an enlightening education on how food and passion connects us all. It also was a thrill, featuring some of the most exciting cooking the show has ever produced and, in her final season, the most thoughtful and compassionate hosting and judging that Padma Lakshmi has given. For fans of the series, this season was a true gift. —K.F.
Velma
Now streaming on Max
Quite a few viewers and critics didn’t take kindly to Velma, Max’s spinoff about the Scooby-Doo gang’s geeky ringleader. Don’t let those ghosts wearing old sheets and strangers in rubber masks fool you: This meddling kid got away with a big swing. It takes a moment to settle into the groove of the series, which is very much for adults (there are plenty of sexual references and f-bombs here). But once the overarching mystery of Season 1 is set in motion, Velma turns into a raunchy romp that breaks the Scooby-Doo mold by turning the cartoon’s oldest tropes on their head at every turn. Totally irreverent and perfectly silly, Velma’s self-referential first season only suggests good things for its future. —C.S.
What We Do in the Shadows
Now streaming on Hulu
I firmly believe that What We Do in the Shadows is our best “friends just hanging out” comedy since, well, Friends. The fact that the cast manages to give some of the most outrageous performances on TV, while keeping their characters somehow grounded—as grounded as vampires can be—is astounding. And the writing continues to be some of the cleverest (and crudest) at the moment. But what struck me about Season 5 is the introduction of existentialism, an unexpected note for a series that is about vampires who literally live forever. As often I was doubled over laughing, I was deeply moved by this season, which may be its best yet. —K.F.
