Our critic's top TV shows of 2023: 'The Bear,' 'Reservation Dogs,' 9 more

Perhaps you'd be surprised to learn that TV critics don't get around to watching every new series that rolls in. But at least once they've celebrated the already-celebrated (“Succession,” “The Crown,” “Ted Lasso,” which all ended their runs in 2023), they are left with what may be the single most enjoyable job in all of journalism — finding something just as good, or even better.

Finding those worthy shows wasn't all that hard in 2023. Here's my Top 10 list:

1. 'THE BEAR' (FX on Hulu)

With “Succession” now out of the way, “The Bear” is TV's best for lots of reasons, but obviously details are what matters here, because “The Bear” really is all about the details. Take the remarkable episodes “Fishes” (the Berzatto family Christmas dinner) or “Forks” (Richie — Ebon Moss-Bachrach — cleans the forks). As I said in my second season review, what “The Bear” is really all about is whether human frailty can be overcome through art. Can the whole messy fraught package of humanness be vanquished by craftsmanship at the highest level? Smartly written and acted, “The Bear” has a redemptive spirit. As painful as this drama (please, Emmys, not a comedy) often is, it's shadowed by hope.

2. 'RESERVATION DOGS' (FX on Hulu)

“Reservation Dogs” was a coming-of-age series but especially a coming-to-grips one. To grips with the loss of culture and heritage, of language and history, and perhaps most grievously, the loss of ancestors, or at least their ghosts. The three season arc was about healing but also about restoration of the adjacent spirit world, and acknowledgment of it. TV's first and only fully North American Indian series was on a mission to restore dignity to Indigenous lives and culture, but also to that vanished spirit world. It's astonishing that it managed the feat so well.

3. 'FOUNDATION' (Apple TV+)

Why doesn't this (loose) adaptation of the Isaac Asimov trilogy ever seem to get much attention? Maybe because it's often abstruse, chatty, convoluted, time-jumpy and world-building on steroids? Nevertheless, streaming has offered celebrated big-screen action writer David S. Goyer a chance to finally tackle this classic about an empire entering an endless dark age with all the care and complexity it required. So here's my advice to potential fans — don't think, just watch. Let this all flow (stream?) over you without stopping once to Google a plotline, or figure out a character named who? Or a planet named whatzit? Only then will the beauty and majesty of this spectacle begin to work its magic.

4. 'DROPS OF GOD' (Apple TV+)

I can't think of a singularly more pleasurable TV journey in 2023 than this one, based on the long-running Japanese manga series, about Paris-based writer Camille Léger (Fleur Geffrier) and wine expert Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita), both rivals for the vast wine collection of Camille's recently deceased father. This well-hidden gem came from French screenwriter Quoc Dang Tran (Netflix's “Marianne”), who said in a 2022 interview that he especially wanted to “identify the theme that was underneath.” He did indeed, by creating a taut, elegant, compulsively watchable series that explores what unites cultures as opposed to what divides them.

5. 'A MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD' (FX on Hulu)

Set in our uneasy moment of AI, global warming, endless world crises and tech demigods (or demagogues) who have answers for each, this seven-parter by Brit Marling and longtime production partner Zal Batmanglij takes place on a barren snowscape in Iceland, where the winds howl off the jökull (glacier) and death stalks the unsuspecting. Trillionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) has invited a dozen or so tech talents to his remote retreat where he hopes that together they will come up with solutions to those world's problems. Murder intrudes instead. Emma Corrin as Darby Hart, the amateur detective with a gift for solving the unsolvable, turns in a performance that easily matches that one in “The Crown” (Diana, remember?).

6. 'LAWMEN: BASS REEVES' (Paramount+)

What was it like to be the first Black U.S. Marshal when all available evidence, or an endless stream of all-white TV Westerns from the '60s or '70s, has long indicated that such a person must be a unicorn? The real Bass Reeves died at the age of 71 in 1910 (peacefully, apparently) after making thousands of arrests on the frontier. This powerful, plaintive Western — starring David Oyelowo as the deputy marshal himself — explores his life and legacy. Better still, it adds a whole new dimension to that central American origin story — the opening of the West.

7. 'THE LAST OF US' (HBO)

This adaptation of the popular video game got the core cast almost exactly right (Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey) and a core message, too. This wasn't really about the (reanimated) dead as much as about the living. Early on, a child asks the essential question here — if you turn into a monster, are you still a monster inside? From the lips of children, because “The Last of Us”' was about an America (as I wrote in my review) shorn of civility, wracked by hatred, where the rule of law is as dead (or as chaotic) as the dead themselves. Sure, this was a hit because shows with guns, zombies, violence and apocalyptic wastelands always are. It was also a cautionary tale about our lesser angels.

8. 'POKER FACE' (Peacock)

Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale evoked Peter Falk's Lt. Columbo, in this rare procedural, as an old soul with a sharp eye and sharper mind. As a sleuth, Charlie was attuned to all the weird rhythms and beats of life on the road (along with solving crimes, she was also on the run), but especially to the oddballs and misfits she met along the way. She embraced them all, no doubt seeing some of herself in them, too.

9. 'SLOW HORSES' (Apple TV+)

The single best reason to love “Slow Horses” is Gary Oldman, whose Jackson Lamb enjoys nothing better than humiliating his minions with tasks calculated to further shred their already diminished self-esteem. Slough House is where disgraced MI5 agents go to rot, but (of course) they're really all first-rate agents who were sent there because they screwed up at headquarters, with River Cartwright (Jack Lowdon) chief among them. Yet Oldman has created perhaps the most memorable character on all of TV at the moment, with that Grinch-sized heart that masks a subtle mind and encyclopedic knowledge of spycraft. While he too has been banished to purgatory, “Slow Horses” proves purgatory is a wonderful place to explore character — even more so this second season.

10. 'FISK'/'PARTY DOWN' (Netflix/Starz)

A tie! After a 13-year hiatus, “Party Down” returned without missing a step. Almost the entire crew of the Los Angeles catering company Party Down was back, with their still-burning, still-arrested, career aspirations as funny as ever. Alas, even with the stellar Ken Marino (of West Islip) still in the lead, “Down” got little attention, and a fourth season seems improbable. Then, there was “Fisk,” starring Aussie stand-up Kitty Flanagan, as Helen Tudor-Fisk, a probate attorney at Sydney-based Gruber & Gruber — think, as you're meant to, of Dunder Mifflin Down Under. Both the show (which launched on Netflix this fall but premiered on Aussie TV a couple years ago) and lead are terrific.