Best TV Episodes of 2023

Nice TV collection can run for dozens or a whole bunch of hours, however we nonetheless expertise them a bit at a time. This checklist is devoted to these items: a handful of the most effective episodes that Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I noticed in a yr {of professional} viewership.

As common, this checklist isn’t complete — it wouldn’t be if it have been 10 instances as lengthy. And as common, I averted repeating reveals that have been on my Better of 2023 checklist. So I may have, however didn’t, embody standout installments from “The Final of Us” (“Lengthy, Lengthy Time”), “Succession” (“Connor’s Wedding ceremony”) and “The Bear” (for me, “Forks” not “Fishes,” nothing towards the latter). Contemplate it a place to begin, and be at liberty so as to add your personal. JAMES PONIEWOZIK

‘Australian Survivor’

Season 8, Episode 7: ‘Return of the King’

“Australian Survivor” has been outplaying the U.S. model for some time now, and nowhere was that extra evident than on this jaw-dropping episode from the “Heroes vs. Villains” season. The episode’s last tribal council featured a masterstroke of psychological manipulation by George Mladenov, or “King George,” who emerged as some of the telegenic antagonists of any model of the present. American “Survivor” remains to be a delight, however this iteration at present wears the crown. (Streaming on 10play.) PONIEWOZIK

‘Bob’s Burgers’

Season 14, Episode 2: ‘The Superb Rudy’

It’s a uncommon comedy that may keep high quality, and even enhance, going into its 14th season. It’s a good rarer one which, this lengthy into its run, can pull off a putting and efficient departure from type like this side-character highlight. Shunting the Belcher household to the wings for many of the episode, this half-hour dove into the household historical past of the anxious grade-schooler Common-Sized Rudy (voiced by Brian Huskey) as he looked for a magic trick that would save a clumsy dinner along with his divorced dad and mom. Humorous, poignant and finally uplifting, “The Superb Rudy” confirmed that this burger joint can pull off a particular particular of the week. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK

‘Bob’s Burgers’

Season 13, Episode 22: ‘Amelia’

You might fill this checklist with episodes of “Bob’s Burgers”; from the previous 12 months, “The Plight Earlier than Christmas” and “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” additionally come to thoughts. The Season 13 finale typified the Fox comedy’s embrace of eccentricity, individuality and generosity of spirit, because the compulsively aggressive fourth-grader Louise (Kristen Schaal) agonized over a multimedia report on her unexpectedly chosen hero, Amelia Earhart. Her eventual triumph was a satisfying and gently comedian victory for all formidable, troublesome, undervalued women and girls. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALE

‘Carol & the Finish of the World’

Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Sisters’

To the burgeoning style of big-hearted apocalypse tales (“Station Eleven,” “The Final of Us”) add this grownup animated collection, set within the months earlier than a looming planetary collision, which arrived too late for my annual best-TV checklist. By a collection of home-video snippets, this episode follows the introverted Carol (Martha Kelly) on a mountain climbing journey along with her exuberant sister, Elena (Bridget Everett), because the mismatched siblings attempt to bond earlier than doomsday. (Streaming on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK

‘Cunk on Earth’

Season 1, Episode 3: ’The Renaissance Is not going to be Televised’

I may in all probability have picked any of the 5 ridiculous episodes of this historical past mockumentary, however I’m a fan of the Renaissance installment. In it, Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) walks us by way of a few of the main occasions between 1440 and 1830 or so, along with her dopey and weird questions. She and a da Vinci professional have a look at “The Vitruvian Man,” and she or he asks, “What’s it for?” In praising the artist’s Final Supper, she marvels, “You virtually really feel like you possibly can crawl inside it and betray Jesus your self.” As for the French Revolution, she explains that “The guillotine was particularly designed to be probably the most humane solution to decapitate somebody in entrance of a jeering crowd.” “Cunk” is dorky buffoonery at its finest. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONS

‘Dave’

Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Harrison Ave.’

The fictional-autobiographical FXX comedy in regards to the rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) might be raunchy and scatological and outrageous. This third-season episode, nevertheless — effectively, it was nonetheless all that but in addition insightful and candy. Because the title character returns house to shoot a video a few childhood romance — solid with a slew of child-actor variations of himself in addition to his precise younger love, now grown up — the following chaos turns into a mirrored image on movie star, reminiscence and the tasks of memoir. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK

‘Extraordinary’

Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Shock!’

In “Extraordinary,” everybody on earth will get a superpower on their 18th birthday; Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 and hasn’t gotten hers but. Whereas the humiliation and confusion she feels about this drives a few of the present, it’s secondary to the loving however bickering friendship along with her roommate and bestie, her tense relationship along with her mom and her budding romance with a shape-shifter who entered her life as a stray cat. This all involves a head within the season finale, when an enormous, messy occasion pulls collectively all of the present’s quirky characters and plot strains — after which simply when issues are feeling completely happy and resolved, it ends with an ideal record-scratch twist. Ah, the most effective type of hurts so good. (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONS

‘Frontline’

Season 42, Episode 5: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’

This unaffectedly brutal documentary, filmed by the Related Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, belongs on each checklist of the yr’s finest films; by way of the great places of work of “Frontline,” which was concerned in its manufacturing, it may be included right here. In backyards, on debris-strewn streets and within the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital, Chernov information the anger, despair and utter bewilderment of Ukrainian civilians throughout the early days of the Russian invasion. And as he and his staff dash throughout open areas and hunker down in flimsy stairwells, he narrates their determined efforts to get the information to the world. (Streaming on PBS.org.) HALE

‘Killing It’

Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Mallory’

Claudia O’Doherty gave one in every of 2023’s finest comedic performances in Peacock’s capitalism satire, as Jillian Glopp, a gig employee turned accomplice in a struggling noticed palmetto farm. Within the second season’s second episode, the theft of her beloved automotive — a funds Kia she’s named “Mallory” — cracks her candy disposition, turning her right into a raging vengeance seeker and unleashing the frustration of years scraping by in a dog-eat-dog financial system. O’Doherty filters her character’s crackup by way of a blazing beam of Aussie sunshine. (Streaming on Peacock.) PONIEWOZIK

‘A Spy Amongst Associates’

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Snow’

Alexander Cary’s miniseries dramatizing the final days of friendship between the traitorous British spy Kim Philby (Man Pearce) and his fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) emphasised delicate, advanced psychology over spy craft (although it had that too). This can be why it didn’t obtain the discover it ought to have. The penultimate episode, through which the total dimensions of Philby’s downfall turned obvious, was — like your entire collection — a clinic in naturalistic appearing by Lewis, Pearce and their co-star Anna Maxwell Martin. (Streaming on MGM+.) HALE

‘Stolen Youth: Contained in the Cult at Sarah Lawrence’

Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Larryland’

Every little thing in regards to the case of the middle-aged dad Lawrence V. Ray and the group of vivid younger school college students he drew right into a cultlike miasma of thoughts management, sexual exploitation and indentured servitude is tough to fathom. Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, considered documentary collection made the occasions each extra understandable and, in its makes an attempt to know a few of the victims, extra opaque and mysterious. The ultimate episode, which got here out throughout Ray’s trial (he’s serving a 60-year sentence for intercourse trafficking and different crimes), was a heartbreaking, mesmerizing summation of the case’s contradictions. (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE

‘Telemarketers’

Half 1

From its opening moments, HBO’s “Telemarketers” is all about shaggy veracity: Once we meet our protagonists, Sam Lipman-Stern (additionally one of many present’s administrators) is shirtless in mattress, and Patrick J. Pespas is excessive within the entrance seat of a automotive. The 2 labored collectively at a telemarketing firm, small cogs in a despicable grift, however the workplace itself is house to actual camaraderie — and actual chaos, thanks partly to pervasive drug use. Lipman-Stern’s grainy footage from his teenage years captures the outrageousness of his office but in addition Pespas’s intense, charismatic vitality. Whereas the next episodes expose extra of the telemarketing trade’s shadiest work, the primary installment is an on the spot, startling immersion into its topics’ views. (Streaming on Max.) LYONS

‘Wrestlers’

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Mom’

There are dozens of poignant, private moments in “Wrestlers,” a documentary collection a few low-level skilled wrestling league. Humor, ardour, ambition — loads of all of these, too. However one episode is a real jaw-dropper, and its climax is a demise match between a mom and daughter. Marie was a younger mother and went to jail whereas her daughter, Haley, was a toddler. They by no means actually reconciled, however now they’re in the identical wrestling league, the place Marie is a doting veteran and Haley, now additionally a younger mom herself, a fast-rising star. Marie says Haley is a “carbon copy” of her; Haley doesn’t see it that approach. However they each like turning one type of ache into one other type of ache, they usually carry all their anger and grief into the ring. Additionally they carry folding chairs, a trash-can lid and hundreds of thumbtacks, and by the tip of the match, they’re each battered, and Marie’s face is roofed in blood. It’s maybe probably the most visceral catharsis I’ve ever seen. (Streaming on Netflix.) LYONS