The Best TV Episodes of 2023

Great TV shows can last dozens or even hundreds of hours, but we still experience them in bits and pieces. This list is dedicated to these pieces: a few of the best episodes Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons, and I have seen in our year-long professional viewing.

Here zamAs it stands, this list is not comprehensive; It wouldn't have happened if it was 10 times longer. And every zamAs of now, I have avoided repeating the shows that are on my Best of 2023 list. I mean, I could have included highlights from productions like “The Last of Us” (“Long, Long Time”), “Succession” (“Connor’s Wedding”) and “The Bear” (“Forks” for me), but I didn’t. Not “Pisces”, nothing against the latter). Consider this a starting point and feel free to add your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK

'Survivor in Australia'

Season 8 Episode 7: 'The Return of the King'

“Australian Survivor” has been outselling the U.S. version for a while now, and nowhere near “Heroes vs. Never more evident than this jaw-dropping episode of the “Villains” season. The episode's final tribal council featured masterful psychological manipulation by George Mladenov, or “King George,” who emerged as one of the most telegenic antagonists of any version of the series. American “Survivor” is still a delight, but this iteration currently carries the crown. (Airing on 10play.) PONIEWOZIK

'Bob's Burgers'

Season 14 Episode 2: ‘The Amazing Rudy’

It's a rare comedy that can maintain its quality and even improve as it enters its 14th season. For such a long period of time, this side character is an even rarer model who can break away from form as strikingly and effectively as a spotlight. Sidelining the Belcher family for most of the episode, this half-hour episode delved into the family history of anxious elementary schooler Regular Size Rudy (voiced by Brian Huskey) as he searches for a magic trick that could save a strange child. dinner with his divorced parents. Funny, touching and ultimately uplifting, “The Amazing Rudy” showed that this burger joint could pull off a distinctive special of the week. (Airing on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK

'Bob's Burgers'

Season 13 Episode 22: 'Amelia'

You can fill this list with “Bob’s Burgers” episodes; “The Pre-Christmas Situation” and “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” also come to mind from the last 12 months. The Season 13 finale was typical of the Fox comedy's embrace of eccentricity, individuality and generous spirit; hypercompetitive fourth-grader Louise (Kristen Schaal) agonizes over a multimedia report about her hastily chosen hero, Amelia Earhart. Her ultimate victory was a satisfying and slightly funny victory for all the ambitious, difficult, scorned girls and women. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALE

'Carol and the End of the World'

Season 1 Episode 4: ‘Sisters’

Add to the burgeoning genre of big-hearted apocalypse stories (“Station Eleven,” “The Last of Us”) this adult animated series set in the months before impending planetary collision that arrives too late for my annual best TV list. In this episode, through a series of home videos, introvert Carol (Martha Kelly) goes for a walk with her enthusiastic sister Elena (Bridget Everett), while the misfit siblings try to bond before doomsday. (Airing on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK

'The dirt on the earth'

Season 1 Episode 3: 'Renaissance Will Not Be Broadcast on Television'

I probably could have chosen any of the five ridiculous episodes of this history mockumentary, but I'm partial to the Renaissance installment. Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) tells us about some important events between 1440 and 1830 with her stupid and strange questions. He and a da Vinci expert look at the “Vitruvian Man” and ask, “What is this for?” he asks. “You almost feel like you could walk into it and betray Jesus,” She says in praise of the artist's Last Supper. As for the French Revolution, he explains: “The guillotine was specifically designed as the most humane way to behead someone in front of a jeering crowd.” “Cunk” is silly buffoonery at its best. (Airing on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONS

'Dave'

Season 3 Episode 2: ‘Harrison Ave.’

The fictional-autobiographical FXX comedy about rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) can be salacious, salacious and outrageous. But this third season episode – that was still all but the same zamHe was understanding and sweet at the time. When the title character returns home to shoot a video about a childhood crush—a cast that includes a cast of child actor versions of himself alongside his actual teenage crush, now all grown up—the resulting chaos becomes a reflection of fame, memory, and the past. responsibilities of memories. (Airing on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK

'Extraordinary'

Season 1 Episode 8: 'Surprise!'

In “Extraordinary,” everyone in the world gets a superpower on their 18th birthday; Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 and hasn't gotten hers yet. While the humiliation and confusion she feels about this drives some of the show, it's secondary to her loving but contentious friendship with her roommate and best friend, her strained relationship with her mother, and her budding romance with a shapeshifter who comes into her life as a shapeshifter. a stray cat. This all comes to a head in the season finale, when a big, messy party brings together all the show's interesting characters and plot threads—and then, just when things are happily and resolved, it ends with a perfect record-breaking twist. Ah, the best kind of pain is so beautiful. (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONS

'Front line'

Season 42 Episode 5: '20 Days in Mariupol'

This unflinchingly brutal documentary, shot by Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, is on the list of the year's best films; It can be included here thanks to the good intentions of “Frontline” who were involved in its production. In backyards, debris-strewn streets, and the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital, Chernov records the anger, despair, and utter confusion of Ukrainian civilians in the early days of the Russian occupation. He describes his desperate efforts to get the news out to the world, as he and his team race across open fields and hide in flimsy staircases. (Airing on PBS.org.) HALE

'He's killing her'

Season 2 Episode 2: ‘Mallory’

Claudia O'Doherty delivers one of the best comedy performances of 2023 in Peacock's satire of capitalism; Jillian Glopp, a laborer, becomes a partner in a struggling saw palmetto farm. In the second episode of the second season, the theft of his beloved car – an affordable Kia he names “Mallory” – sours his sweet disposition, turning him into a furious revenge seeker and unleashing the frustration of years of jostling. economy. O’Doherty filters his character’s madness through a bright ray of Australian sunlight. (Broadcasting on Peacock.) PONIEWOZIK

'A Spy Among Friends'

Season 1 Episode 5: 'Snow'

Alexander Cary's miniseries, which dramatized the final days of the friendship between renegade British spy Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) and fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), emphasized subtle, complex psychology over the craft of espionage (though there was that, too). For this reason, he may not have received the notification he should have received. The penultimate episode, in which the full extent of Philby's decline is revealed, was, like the entire series, a clinic in the naturalistic acting of Lewis, Pearce and their co-star Anna Maxwell Martin. (Airing on MGM+.) HALE

'Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence'

Season 1 Episode 3: ‘Larryland’

It's hard to understand everything about middle-aged father Lawrence V. Ray and the bright young college students he drags into a cult-like environment of mind control, sexual exploitation, and indentured servitude. Zachary Heinzerling's comprehensive and sensible documentary series has made the events both more understandable and more transparent and mysterious in its efforts to understand some of the victims. The final chapter, revealed during Ray's trial (he is serving a 60-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes), was a heartbreaking, fascinating summary of the contradictions of the case. (Airing on Hulu.) HALE

‘Marketers’

Section 1

HBO's "Telemarketers" is all about realism from its opening moments: When we meet our heroes, Sam Lipman-Stern (sic. zam(currently one of the show's directors) is shirtless in bed, while Patrick J. Pespas sits in the front seat. car. The two worked together at a telemarketing company, small cogs in a vile scam, but the office itself was home to genuine friendship and genuine chaos, thanks in part to rampant drug use. Lipman-Stern's grainy images of her teenage years capture both the ugliness of the workplace and Pespas's intense, charismatic vitality. While subsequent chapters expose the telemarketing industry's darkest workings, the first chapter provides an immediate and surprising immersion into the subjects' perspectives. (Airing on Max) LYONS

'Wrestlers'

Season 1 Episode 5: 'Mother'

There are dozens of poignant, personal moments in “The Wrestlers,” a docuseries about a low-level professional wrestling league. Humor, passion, ambition; There are plenty of all of these. But one episode is truly jaw-dropping, and the climax is the lethal match between a mother and her daughter. Marie was a young mother and her daughter Haley went to prison when she was a child. No zamThey didn't fully reconcile at the moment, but now they are in the same wrestling league; Marie is a very experienced actress and Haley, a young mother herself, is a fast rising star. Marie says Haley is a "carbon copy" of herself; Haley doesn't see it that way. But they both enjoy turning one kind of pain into another, and they bring all their anger and grief into the ring. They also bring folding chairs, a trash can lid, and thousands of thumbtacks, and by the end of the match, they are both battered and Marie's face is covered in blood. Perhaps the most heartfelt catharsis I have ever experienced. (Airing on Netflix.) LYONS