TV SHOWS

By Judy Berman

1. SUCCESSION and RESERVATION DOGS (tie)

This was the rare year when two series brilliantly, in their own ways, fulfilled the potential of television. HBO’s Succession, an Emmy-winning drama that drove watercooler conversation, was the obvious choice. Creator Jesse Armstrong and his virtuosic cast didn’t waste a second of the show’s final arc, which unfolded largely in the aftermath of media mogul Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) ingeniously executed midair death. Every episode earned the fanfare that greeted it: Swedish tech edgelord Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) waging psychological warfare on the Roy kids in Norway! That white-knuckle election episode! That tour de force funeral episode! The bangers just kept coming. And the finale made the biggest bang of all, ending a race to the bottom that everyone, especially the broken Roy siblings, won.

FX’s Reservation Dogs, by contrast, never chased the zeitgeist. Sterlin Harjo’s dramedy chronicled the hijinks of outsiders: Native American teens on a reservation mourning a friend whodied by suicide. Profane, poignant, at times psychedelic, the series moved fluidly between adolescent awkwardness, small-town character comedy, Indigenous spirituality, and the righteous anger of the disenfranchised. While the teenage Rez Dogs remained at the show’s center, its circle kept expanding until it encompassed the entire community—young and old, living and spectral.

Yet the shows had plenty in common. Both were irreverent. Both mixed poetically foulmouthed comedy and tragedy. Both had profound things to say about the sociopolitical realities of our time, insights they accessed through finely wrought characters unique to their worlds—lonely masters of the universe in one case, members of a disadvantaged but fiercely loving community in the other. Together, they capture the polarized extremes of American life in the yearthat was.

3. I’M A VIRGO

The streaming arm of a megacorp led by one of the world’s richest people kicked off 2023’s “hot labor summer” with this flagrantly anticapitalist comedy from radical rapper and Sorry to Bother You filmmaker Boots Riley. His surreal allegory cast Jharrel Jerome as Cootie, a 13-ft.-tall teen folk hero for our times—and a gentle giant who must learn that powerful forces within American society will always see a strong Black man as a thug and a threat. Riley’s secret weapons are humor and humanism. His message may be militant, but he delivers it in a package cushioned by laughs, love, and a lively vision of liberation. (Amazon)

4. RAIN DOGS

An intimate portrait of a fascinatingly unconventional family, follows a peep-show dancer and aspiring writer (Daisy May Cooper) struggling to support her tween