LA Times: The best TV shows of 2023

 

 

 

Lorraine Ali  Los Angeles Times

"The Horror of Dolores Roach" is thoroughly entertaining eat-or-be-eaten tale about the plight of the last few brown folks left in a gentrifying New York neighborhood, where“ Sweeney Todd” darkness meets a spot-on comedy about class, race and displacement.

The television critics for the Los Angeles Times, Lorraine Ali and Robert Lloyd, weigh in on the series they enjoyed the most in 2023, including some that ended, some that were new and some that were international, but all worth watching.
Lorraine Ali: 10 top shows that remind us it's about the people

Remember early spring of this year, when praise and recommendations for new and returning TV shows were arriving at a dizzying pace? “The Last of Us”! “Beef”! The final seasons of “Ted Lasso,” “Succession” and Bill Hader’s superbly dark hit man comedy, “Barry.” While the bounty of content didn’t stop the perennial conversations about the death of prestige TV and the alarming contraction of streamers, it did fuel our ongoing anxiety about never catching up with all the suggestions in our viewing queue. When will I ever find the time to watch all this!? Well, your answer has arrived and it’s called 2024.

The great programming drought is upon us, turning the last decade of too much content into something that appears closer to manageable, and you can thank the writers’ and actors’ strikes for this moment of relief. Studios went dark, halting production on returning shows like Apple TV+’s “Severance,” causing many series premiere dates to be delayed by months if not years.

Expect more reality programming and game shows to fill the gap, at least in the first half of 2024. Which brings me back to this top 10 list.

More so than any other year-end list I’ve done over my career as a TV critic, this one should be used to remind you that television is a font of colorful, poignant dramas and ridiculously creative comedies when the medium’s talent are taken care of as they should be. Take them out of the picture, and there’s nothing. So here are 10 shows from 2023 to remind us that it’s people, not brand names or companies, who drive the most vital form of entertainment in American culture right now.

‘The Horror of Dolores Roach’ (Prime Video)

A thoroughly entertaining eat-or-be-eaten tale about the plight of the last few brown folks left in a gentrifying New York neighborhood, where “Sweeney Todd” darkness meets a spot-on comedy about class, race and displacement. Dynamo Justina Machado (“Six Feet Under,” “One Day at a Time”) plays Dolores, fresh out of prison after taking the rap for her ex on a drug-dealing charge. She returns to her old Washington Heights neighborhood after 16 years in the pen only to find rent has quadrupled, yoga studios have replaced bodegas, and pet spas are now a thing. She’s alone until she runs into an old neighborhood acquaintance, Luis (Alejandro Hernandez) who’s running his late father’s restaurant, Empanada Loca. He offers Dolores a rent-free apartment in the basement, where she sets up a masseuse business. And just as customers begin disappearing, the diner offers up a new empanada recipe that becomes a hit among the area’s Instagramming foodies. Based on a Gimlet podcast and a play of the same name, the brisk and morbidly hilarious “Dolores Roach” flew under the radar when it arrived on Prime Video in July, and the streamer did not renew the series for a second season, which is criminal. Luckily you still have the chance to consume Season 1 of this macabre masterpiece.

‘Reservation Dogs,’ Season 3 (FX on Hulu)

The final season of FX on Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs” was a beautifully constructed goodbye to a wonderfully quirky series that challenged every previous TV and film narrative about Native Americans. The half-hour comedy co-created and executive produced by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi followed a quartet of close-knit teenagers — Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) — as they grappled with whether to stay or leave their fictional Oklahoma reservation. The gang’s journey brought us through the mundane churn of junk food meals and high school crushes, as well as the pain of absent parents and the magical realism of smart-ass spirit guides such as William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth). But the third and final season was the most poignant of them all thanks to unforgettable narratives like “Deer Lady,” an episode that explored the brutality and humiliation of Indian boarding schools and the government’s push over the last two centuries to force assimilation and flatten Indigenous culture. If you watch nothing else, watch this haunting episode. “Reservation Dogs” ended as it began, with an open question about where the friends fit in, and why ultimately it doesn’t matter because they have each other, their elders and the community to catch them when they fall.

‘The Last of Us’ (HBO)

Did I want to watch a drama about a plague that caused lockdowns, supply-chain shortages and the potential destruction of the human race? Not really, but HBO’s “The Last of Us” is such a cinematic masterpiece — from its emotive storytelling to its character development to its attention to detail (it’s adapted from a video game of the same name) — it won me over with a dynamic 90-minute premiere episode starring Pedro Pascal as Joel, a postapocalyptic bounty hunter. Once Ellie (Bella Ramsey) entered the picture, there was no turning back from this intense survivalist series about a gruff killer who vows to protect a teenager from a dangerous world filled with swarms of “infected.” There were many questions from the outset about how this TV adaptation from Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”) of a video game would work, but it managed to stay true to the story, and re-create many of the battles, while adding deeply moving subplots. “Long, Long Time,” an episode starring Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman as survivors who found love in the rubble of post-civilization, produced one of the best moments on television in 2023. That alone made up for an underwhelming finale, and ensured I could never hear that song performed by Linda Ronstadt again without tearing up.

‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’ (Netflix)

Losing oneself in the fantasy of the “Bridgerton” series from Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland once meant escaping into the frivolity of England’s Regency-era aristocracy, replete with the snooty frivolity of the Ton. The show paired the expected scuttlebutt around marriage matches, clandestine rendezvous and heartbreak with a modernist take on the elite set of 19th century England. It was no big deal that the queen was Black, the king was white, and the will-they-or-won’t-they romance at the heart of each season was between a mixed-race couple. Diversity just is in this world, which was as baffling as it was refreshing.

But the prequel “Queen Charlotte” goes there, explaining how a Black woman ascended to the throne in a society built atop a lily-white class system, and it does so with heart, humor and intricately woven bits of social commentary. Golda Rosheuvel plays the adult royal, while India Ria Amarteifio plays a younger version of the queen, who’s 17 and a German princess when she’s betrothed to a young King George III (Corey Mylchreest). Between her struggles to be accepted and his battles with mental health, the story is riveting and playful (her towering wigs should have their own show), but it’s also painful, and those moments are handled with more depth and compassion than the other two installations of this franchise. The Ton is still as cold and insufferable as ever, which makes the finale of “Queen Charlotte” — a work of love and empathy — all the more remarkable.

‘Poker Face’ (Peacock)

Clouds of cigarette smoke emanate from this case-of-the-week murder-mystery series inspired by the cigar-chomping 1970s detective “Columbo.” But this time around, he’s a she. Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is a human BS detector, which is both a blessing and a curse for a girl trying to outrun mobsters and the law. There’s a hard-nosed charm to this series, which is an ode to network detective shows of yore but is also a manifestation of something that’s clearly been fighting its way out of Lyonne since she hit the screen as a teenager in films like “The Slums of Beverly Hills.” The tough, call-it-like-it-is character she created for “Russian Doll” encapsulated some of this swaggering persona, but “Poker Face” introduces a new gravelly-voiced character who is as cunning as she is fallible. Created by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out,” “Glass Onion”), the series features new guest stars with each episode — among them Nick Nolte, Ellen Barkin, Jameela Jamil and Chloë Sevigny — taking viewers on the run, across the country in a 1969 Plymouth Barracuda.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Netflix)

Based loosely on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a riveting mixture of Gothic horror, eat-the-rich commentary and whodunit mystery. For those not into scary storytelling, this eight-part miniseries is much more than a fright fest. It’s a high-level drama from horror master Mike Flanagan, and it’s his best series offering to date, even next to “The Haunting of Hill House.”

Big Pharma billionaire Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) has left a trail of broken souls and bodies on his way up the corporate ladder to the position of owner and CEO of an empire specializing in highly addictive pain medication. But he rules with no apparent successor, despite the fact that he has six adult children from multiple mothers. The siblings are a pampered, morally challenged bunch who fight among themselves for the throne. But this is not “Succession.” There’s a mystery to solve: Why are they dying one by one, in cruel and gruesome ways? It’s a gripping tale of greed and regret.

‘Beef’ (Netflix)

The first episode of this Netflix series from Lee Sung Jin was so angry and full of road rage, it made one question why you’d want to sit through the rest of a series that simulates the unpleasantness of a daily commute in L.A. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) accidentally cuts off the car of Amy Lau (Ali Wong) while backing out of a parking space. She flips him off. The small incident balloons into a chase, then builds into an obsession for each party to get back at the other: the out-of-work handyman and his late-model Toyota Tacoma versus the wealthy entrepreneur in her shiny new Mercedes SUV. But from there, “Beef” skillfully pivots from a vendetta drama into a character-driven series about the events and life circumstances behind all that anger. Both parties contend with dashed hopes, unfulfilled expectations and family tensions. And it turns out their internal struggles are far more compelling than a high-speed car chase through the San Fernando Valley.

‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ (Hulu)

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for anything featuring Kathryn Hahn in a prominent role (“WandaVision,” “The Shrink Next Door”), so when “Tiny Beautiful Things” premiered last spring with her in the lead, I was predisposed to fall for this drama. And Hahn does not disappoint as Clare Pierce, the anonymous writer behind the advice column “Dear Sugar.” Clare helps readers pull their lives together as hers is falling apart. Based on Cheryl Strayed’s book of the same name, the series follows Clare as she grapples with her failures as a daughter and a mother. Hahn takes the role to complex emotional heights, infusing the character with a wicked sense of humor and incapacitating vulnerability. If this eight-part miniseries sounds super heavy, it is. You will cry. But there is also something incredibly cathartic about watching a stellar performer like Hahn work though boatloads of grief and self-loathing onscreen. She turns emotional burden into a moving art.

‘Love & Death’ (Max)

There was a lot of confusion around the miniseries “Love & Death” when it premiered on the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max earlier this year. Hadn’t we already seen a drama based on the true case of Candy Montgomery, a Texas housewife who killed friend and neighbor Betty Gore with an ax in 1980 after having a torrid affair with Gore’s husband? Yes, we had. It was called “Candy,” it was on Hulu in 2022 and it starred Jessica Biel. It was unfortunate that this series, written by David E. Kelley, landed so close to that other murderous offering because it meant that many folks missed a compelling, addictive, high-quality true-crime drama. Elizabeth Olsen (“WandaVision”) plays Montgomery, the perfect Southern mom and church lady who harbors a horrible secret between all those soccer matches and Bible school sessions: She’s sleeping with her best friend’s spouse (Jesse Plemons). Although she cuts off the affair, it still leads to a bloody ax attack in Betty’s kitchen. In this version of the tale, it’s hard to take your eyes off Olsen, who portrays Candy as an unflappable woman of faith. Or is she an unfeeling sociopath? You decide.

‘Top Boy,’ Season 5 (Netflix)

Often described as Britain’s answer to “The Wire,” “Top Boy” premiered its fifth and final season on Netflix this fall, answering the question posed in the show’s title: Who would make it to top boy in the drug dealing in and around Hackney’s Summerhouse estate? Childhood friends Dushane (Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kane Robinson) have become kingpins, and only one would be left standing by the series’ end. “Top Boy” stands on its own as a drama that deftly portrays the ugly realities of institutional racism, drug addiction, crime and corrupt law enforcement. There’s five seasons of this series to catch up on, which should help you get through 2024’s initial shortage of new and returning shows. But brace yourself, the finale is a stunner. 

LOS ANGELES TIMES