If you’re a TV fan, 2023 was a gift that kept on giving. This past year blessed us with a smorgasbord of sensational small-screen moments across every genre imaginable. From heart-pounding dramas to gut-busting comedies, intimate character studies to effects-driven spectacles, 2023 had something incredible to offer all tastes.
Looking back on the last 12 months, it’s hard to overstate the embarrassment of riches we witnessed. Many shows delivered not just one, but multiple insta-classic episodes that will be rewatched and dissected for years. Other creative teams swung for the fences with bold experiments in storytelling that paid off in spades.
As we fire up our DVRs to revisit favorites and discover new sleeper hits, there’s an undeniable electricity in the air. The bar has been set sky-high for the kind of innovative, must-see TV we crave. If the industry keeps upping its game like it did this year, then 2024 promises even more months of appointment viewing that will blow our minds. From shocking twists to tender moments, we can’t wait to laugh, cry, and shout at our screens together.
The only hard part will be choosing which of 2023’s masterworks to stream as we settle into the new year. But that trove of all-time greats is a problem we’re thrilled to have. Let’s bask in these peak TV memories before the next wave grabs our attention. With so many brilliant creative minds bringing their A-game, our beloved box has never been more vibrant.
10. “The Orpheus Syndrome,” Poker Face (Season 1, Episode 8)
In a show revered for gorgeous style and macabre imagery, the Natasha Lyonne-directed “The Orpheus Syndrome” stands out as Poker Face’s most hauntingly cinematic episode. Centering on Charlie’s friendship with aging VFX artist Arthur (Nick Nolte), the mystery soon ensares a film exec (Cherry Jones) in a nightmarish world of stop-motion monsters.
Paying tribute to master effects pioneer Phil Tippett, the episode immerses us in an eerie exhibit where puppetry and practical magic create an otherworldly spectacle. As Charlie races to save the executive from her freakish attackers, Lyonne conjures surreal visuals straight out of our childhood nightmares.
But beyond the stunning technical craft, “The Orpheus Syndrome” is a heartfelt paean to cinema’s smoke-and-mirrors illusions. Nolte’s gruff but whimsical performance captures the bittersweet life of an analog artist still devoted to his pioneering craft. Even as CGI conquered Hollywood, Tippett’s handmade creatures – like the episode’s puppet predators – tap into primal fears no computer could conjure.
9. “The Quiet Zone,” Welcome to Wrexham (Season 2, Episode 2)
The underdog soccer saga Welcome to Wrexham mined emotional gold this season with “The Quiet Zone,” spotlighting the club’s role in two moving stories. First, we meet fan Millie Roberts, whose autism led to bullying until the inclusive Wrexham community welcomed her with open arms. Second, the episode follows player Paul Mullin as he comes to terms with his own son’s autism diagnosis.
Crosscutting between Roberts’ passion for the team and Mullin’s journey toward acceptance, the episode beautifully bridges community and club. We see Wrexham fandom as a lifeline of acceptance, while the garage mural created for Mullin’s son packs a tearjerking punch.
Smartly, “The Quiet Zone” eschews sap in favor of candor, letting its subjects speak their truth. Roberts is heroically defiant against those who mocked her special interest. Meanwhile, Mullin admits to past ignorance about disabilities before realizing his son deserves fierce support. There are no easy answers, but in laying their lives bare, both reveal everyday people charting their own quiet revolutions.
8. I’m a Virgo, “Balance Beam” (Season 1, Episode 4)
I’m a Virgo’s reality-bending origin story reached delirious heights in “Balance Beam,” ping-ponging between absurdist sex and grief-fueled fury. On the surface, little connects a tender tryst between gentle giant Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) and speedster Flora (Olivia Washington) with the raging protests over activist Scat’s (Allius Barnes) senseless death. Yet this whiplash-inducing episode captures the emotional spectrum of an unjust world in microcosm.
When Flora and Cootie make love on a cloud trampoline in the sky, their super-powered intimacy celebrates the soaring highs two outcasts create together. But in the streets down below, the activists’ raw outcry confronts brutality and dehumanization head-on. Standout sequences like the ethereal sex scene and the protest’s balletic choreography balance beauty and pain – much like Cootie himself, whose accelerated aging grants childlike joy and sage wisdom in equal measure.
By uniting such radically different threads into one mind-melting tapestry, “Balance Beam” honors the messy totality of life. For marginalized people like Cootie and Flora, even fleeting refuge holds revolutionary power when the dominant culture labels you a menace. But that hard-won dignity only underscores the injustice still thriving all around it.
7. “A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special,” Harley Quinn (Season 3, Episode 11)
Harley Quinn’s NC-17 rom-com reached demented new heights with this adults-only holiday romp, dragging DC’s B-listers into hormone-fueled chaos. When lovesick Bane (James Adomian) overdoses on a Spanish fly-laced protein shake, his priapic frenzy turns Gotham into a landscape of phallic destruction. Meanwhile, Clayface (Alan Tudyk) falls hard for his own disembodied butt after it gets grafted to a stranger’s body.
Yet for all the deliriously crude sight gags, the episode mines emotional truth from pervy absurdity. Bane pathetically seeks the love he lacks behind macho bluster, while Clayface’s self-love speaks to queer people’s journey toward self-acceptance. The randy laughter gives way to damp eyes when Clayface finally reunions with his rear end.
Of course, the special’s mission is reminding us why Harley (Kaley Cuoco) and Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) belong together. As lord of the dance, Brett Goldstein’s Lord Byron undercuts DC’s dude heroes before toasting our antiheroines’ “problematic” passion – pure punk-rock romance.
6. Reservation Dogs, “Frankfurter Sandwich” (Season 3, Episode 6)
Reservation Dogs has always mined gold by bouncing its stoic elders off the reservation’s deadpan youth. But Season 3’s grilled cheese bonding trip “Frankfurter Sandwich” perfects that formula, uniting the generations through peerless comedic chemistry.
Here, young-at-heart Cheese (Lane Factor) drags crotchety trio Brownie, Bucky and Big (Gary Farmer, Wes Studi and Zahn McClarnon) on a junk food run to honor their late peer Mighty. Despite grousing from the start, the excursion soon leads to grandson-granddad hijinks tailor-made for these talents. A gas station hot dog debacle lets Factor’s Gen-Z snark play off the elders’ world-weary bemusement, culminating in a bawling cheese sandwich ceremony mixing laughter and tears.
By building to that emotional catharsis, “Frankfurter Sandwich” continues Reservation Dogs’ graceful exploration of grief amid Indigenous struggle. Having lost his father, Cheese shelters pain behind adolescent quips, leaving his traditions unmoored. But breaking bread with Brownie and the gang forges connection across generations – healing for old wounds and new.
5. “Connor’s Wedding,” Succession (Season 4 Episode 3)
Succession’s long-awaited fourth season delivered its biggest shock just episodes in, killing family patriarch Logan Roy mid-flight. But more than the surprise death, “Connor’s Wedding” devastates through the human wreckage Logan leaves behind.
As Connor’s (Alan Ruck) nuptials unfold, his siblings get word that Logan (Brian Cox) has collapsed on the company jet, experiencing health crises in real time. The next hour becomes a tragic case study of powerful people’s helplessness, despite all their wealth and reach. It’s birth order in reverse, the kids left sobbing, raging and bargaining like infants while the cold, distant father slips away prematurely.
While comic sparks fly early on, Logan’s decline plunges the Roys into howling anguish, led by a career-best turn from Sarah Snook. The script submerges us in the nightmare of getting agonizing news remotely, unfolding it piecemeal through cryptic texts and garbled phone calls. Like the family themselves, we’re left raking through minimal facts and clues, hunting for any leverage to stall the inevitable.
The season would deliver more dramatic fireworks to come. But with tension so taut you couldn’t cut it with a diamond-encrusted knife, “Connor’s Wedding” heralded the beginning of the end for TV’s first family – have the tissues close by.
4. “it takes a psycho,” Barry (Season 4, Episode 4)
Barry’s Emmy-winning hitman dramedy has never shied from darkness. But even longtime fans couldn’t anticipate the narrative carnage of “it takes a psycho,” which shockingly lived up to its name. Escalating the show’s trademark tension past boiling point, the episode piled up betrayals and bloodshed at a dizzying clip.
The horrors arrive fast in a cruel chain reaction, as if creator Alec Berg is testing our nerves and morality alike. When soft-hearted henchman Hank (Anthony Carrigan) guns down his loyal followers, even his stone-cold boss Cristobal (Michael Irby) recoils in disgust. Yet after Bolden seals Cristobal’s fate for that principled stand, Carrigan chillingly shuts the door on his own humanity too.
Meanwhile, Sally (Sarah Goldberg) discovers that Tinseltown success means artistic death, abandoning her movie mid-shoot after an on-set awakening. And with Barry (Bill Hader) AWOL from prison, Gene (Henry Winkler) nearly kills an innocent visitor in self-defense panic. By the time a days-long time jump hints at carnage to come, we reel at the void these broken souls now inhabit.
Somehow amidst the knives-out darkness, Berg still lands killer laughs, whether it’s Sally’s pep talk from CODA director Sian Heder or Hank’s performative grief over his men. As a feral, fearless setup for the show’s endgame, “It Takes a Psycho” confronts us with harsh truths, dares us to laugh anyway, then leaves the characters and viewer alike in free-fall.
3. “Escape from Shit Mountain,” Poker Face (Season 1, Episode 9)
Rian Johnson’s impeccable homage to mystery yarns deals in clever solutions that click neatly into place. But for once daring detective Charlie Cale doesn’t have all the answers right away in “Escape From Shit Mountain” – because for once, she’s also the victim. After surviving a hit and run, Cale takes refuge with three suspicious strangers at a remote motel, only to find herself embroiled in a puzzle spanning decades.
With a snowed-in setting straight from classic locked-room thrillers, episode director Johnson crafts an atmosphere so thick with danger that Charlie feels our dread in her bones. Even without use of her legs, Lyonne brings wry grit to the role as always; her fiery spirit remains undimmed despite her predicament. And the crackerjack cast surrounding her keeps suspicion swirling around the Clue-like crew of scoundrels. Do smarmy Alistair (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his shadowy associate (David Castañeda) want to snuff Charlie for good? Where do the loyalties of elusive Minnie (Stephanie Hsu) truly lie?
The magic lies in how Charlie pieces together the whole truth across generations and motives as convoluted as the lodge’s mazelike halls. Staking Poker Face’s claim as 2023’s shrewdest small-screen mystery machine, “Shit Mountain” proves Lyonne’s unconventional gumshoe can dig herself out of even the deepest holes using nothing but grave stakes and her steel-trap mind.
2. “Long, Long Time,” The Last of Us (Season 1 Episode 3)
On a show fixated on the redemptive power of human bonds amidst apocalyptic horror, no episode distilled that theme more profoundly than the heart-stirring “Long, Long Time.” Detouring from the main plot, this visually sumptuous tearjerker spotlights Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) – two survivors who forge love and meaning in catastrophe’s shadow.
Spanning two decades, we watch gruff loner Bill and gentle newcomer Frank meet, flirt, and settle into an isolated small-town refuge they transform into a miniature paradise. When Linda Ronstadt’s bittersweet ballad swells over images of the couple nurturing tomato plants together, it captures the entire tragicomic miracle of intimacy as an act of rebellion now.
In vignettes skipping across the years, we witness the shy but powerful affection between two complex men society might overlook. Bartlett radiates guileless optimism tempering Offerman’s natural stoicism, together etching a moving study of nurturing caretaking and compatibility.
Of course on this show, no joy can remain untainted by darkness forever. Directors Peter Hoar and Jeremy Webb cleverly intercut idyllic scenes from Bill and Frank’s makeshift haven with reminders of deepening devastation nationwide. And when loss enters the sanctuary they built despite the odds, the episode reaches wrenching new depths. Amidst the horror though, Offerman and Bartlett etch an indelible monument to the worth of intimacy itself – rending our hearts not because love failed these men, but because for a few precious years, it miraculously endured.
1. “Forks,” The Bear (Season 2, Episode 7)
For a show thriving on kinetic kitchen chaos and empathetic character studies alike, the creative pinnacle of The Bear’s sophomore year arrived in “Forks” – an understated yet profoundly moving episode tracing sous chef Richie’s personal revolution. Sent to train abroad after his hero chef’s suicide, Richie spends a week immersed in the exacting methods of an eatery dubbed the world’s best restaurant. He returns to Chicago transformed – yet the true metamorphosis unfolds internally.
On the surface, Richie’s emotional state shift defies plausibility – could one short stretch abroad truly unlock such growth? Yet through patient storytelling and Moss-Bachrach’s note-perfect performance, his evolution feels earned. In the episode’s gentle denouement, Richie’s hushed conversation with his temporary mentor Ama (Olivia Colman) lays bare The Bear’s humane ethos: greatness comes not from profit or glory, but service.
Throughout the series, Richie’s gifted yet self-sabotaging tendencies shadow his struggles with perfectionism and trauma inherited from his celebrity chef brother. But his doctor warns that true health means accepting life’s neutral moments rather than chasing peak highs and lows. In the monastery-like confines of Ama’s kitchen, Richie surrenders at last to the everyday beauty of his craft itself – a revelation that unlocks his dormant potential. Back home in Chicago, he coaches his kitchen with empathetic wisdom. For once fully inhabiting his talents without being trapped by them, he sees others’ potential too.
After seasons of flashy pyrotechnics and meltdowns, the spectacle of “Forks” lies in its minimalism – one man reckoning honestly with his pain so he can be fully present for those who need him. In its quiet force, the episode epitomizes what makes this gem of a show so special. Not bad for 22 minutes about cleaning some forks.
