Josh’s Favorite TV Series of 2023 — Part Four!

I hope you’ve been enjoying my list of my favorite TV series of 2023!  Click here for part one of my list, click here for part two, and click here for part three.

And now, without any further delay, here are my five favorite TV series of 2023:

5. Star Trek: Picard season 3 — A miracle.  I have been heartbreakingly disappointed by all of the modern live-action Star Trek shows.  The first season of Picard started off well but crumbled by the end into ridiculousness, and the second season was a mess.  But somehow, here in this third season, Terry Matalas took the reins and finally made the show that I (and so many other Star Trek fans out there!!) had longed to see: a true reunion of Star Trek: The Next Generation, bring back the full main TNG cast and crafting a thrilling new adventure for them, one that showed a deep reverence for Star Trek and those TNG characters as a whole while also taking care to craft compelling new character arcs for every one of the characters.  In many cases (Gates McFadden in particular), these actors had more interesting parts to play here on Picard season three than they ever did back on TNG!!  It’s incredible.  Mr. Matalas and his team also demonstrated tremendous love and affection for Deep Space Nine and Voyager, bringing back characters and storylines from those shows in fascinating ways.  The visual effects were terrific and the production design, under Dave Blass, finally (as opposed to all the other modern Trek shows) found the balance I knew was possible of being able to create sets, props, starship designs, and more that felt perfectly correct for this era of Trek, while also expanding the mythos in exciting ways.  (Just look at how much better all the Federation starships looked here than on all the other modern Trek shows!!)  And the music!  Here too, Picard season 3 gave me what I’d always wanted: it has a score — beautifully created by Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann — that embraced and referenced all the great Trek music from the previous movies and shows. (Star Wars does this all the time — using the classic music to add resonance to the new stories — but this is a first for Trek, and it is, frankly, amazing.  The series’ main credits combined Jerry Goldsmith’s main title theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was reused as the main theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation, with his theme for Star Trek: First Contact, and it brought me joy every time I watched an episode.)  What a thrill it was to once again — for the first time in decades — be filled with anticipation, each week, for the release of a new Star Trek episode.  Why Paramount keeps announcing new Trek TV and movie projects without locking in Terry Matalas to make one of them is madness to me.  (Click here for my full review of season three.)

4. Party Down season 3 — Here’s another miracle, albeit of an entirely different kind!  It is astonishing to me that twelve years after the brilliant but under-appreciated first two seasons, Starz reassembled the bulk of the original cast and creative team to create a new six-episode third season.  All four of the show’s creators returned (John Enbom, Rob Thomas, Dan Etheridge, & Paul Rudd) and almost all of the original cast (Adam Scott, Martin Starr, Ken Marino, Ryan Hansen, Jane Lynch, Megan Mulally).  (The only main cast member who couldn’t be involved in this relaunch was Lizzy Caplan, because of her work on Fleishman is in Trouble — that was a huge bummer, but luckily she was able to at least make a brief appearance on the show!)  I loved the new cast members (including Jennifer Garner, Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Zoë Chao), who all fit perfectly into the mix.  This new season was brilliant.  They were able to recapture the magic of the show.  The show was as hilarious as ever; the tone was perfect; they were able to recreate what was great about the original seasons without feeling like the show or the characters were stuck in the past.  The writing was just as sharp and funny as the show always was at its best.  The format was the same, from the beloved opening titles music to the show’s device of putting an episode-ending coda in the middle of the closing credits.  The show returned to some of its classic comedic ideas — for example, Ron’s voracious vomiting in front of the girl he loved from high school is, in the finale of this new run of episodes, topped by an outrageous Ron-gets-food-poisoning sequence that had me rolling on the floor in horror and joy.  My major complaint about this new season is that six episodes were far too few!!!  I desperately hope Starz renews the show for an additional season!!  Hopefully many additional seasons!!  (Click here for my full review.)

3. Poker Face season 1 — I have never before in my life watched a murder of the week show.  I was interested in Poker Face because of the involvement of Natasha Lyonne (I loved her show Russian Doll) and writer/director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Glass Onion).  I can’t believe how deeply this fun, funny, scary, thrilling show hooked me!!!  Natasha Lyonne could not be more perfect an anchor for this show.  I loved her character of Charlie, the human lie detector.  She’s smart and brave and good-hearted.  She’s also a wise-ass, and someone not afraid to say exactly what’s on her mind.  Ms. Lyonne plays this character to perfection.  She can be so funny, but also empathetic.  The array of guest stars was jaw-dropping!!  Some of the big names who popped up on the show include: Nick Nolte, Cherry Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dascha Polanco, Adrien Brody, Ben Bratt, Tim Meadows, Jameela Jamil, Tim Blake Nelson, Hong Chau, John Ratzenberger, Lil Rel Howery, Chloë Sevigny, Judith Light, S. Epatha Merkerson, Simon Helberg, Ellen Barkin, Luis Guzmán, Tim Russ, Stephanie Hsu, Ron Perlman, Clea DuVall, and so many more!!!  Wow!!  I loved how each episode felt like a brand new movie of the week, with new characters, locations, and situations.  I loved how funny the show was, while also telling thrilling mystery stories in which there was real physical danger for all the characters, and also emotional weight to the events we see unfolding.  This was an incredible season of television.  I loved all ten episodes.  I can’t wait to watch them all again, and I can’t wait for the second season!!  (Click here for my full review.)

2. For All Mankind season 4 — I need more people to be watching this amazing show!!  If you’re reading this and you haven’t started watching, I cannot encourage you more to dig in and give this terrific show a chance.  I am so happy we’ve gotten four seasons of For All Mankind... I hope for many seasons more!!  For All Mankind depicts an alternate history in which the United States lost the “space race” with the Soviet Union, with the U.S.S.R. becoming the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.  That might seem like a grim, dystopian set-up, but one of the (many) things I love about this series is that the show has trended utopian.  (In fact, Ronald D. Moore, who is one of the co-creators of the series, along with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, has described For All Mankind as “the road to Star Trek.”  I deeply love that idea.)  Here in this fourth season, the show once again leapt forward in time, to 2003 and the colony on Mars run jointly by the United States, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and the huge tech conglomerate Helios.  When an asteroid filled with valuable minerals passes close to Mars, a thrilling plan emerges to capture and mine the asteroid.  As always, this show mines tremendous tension and excitement from the sci-fi adventure (pleasingly grounded in real science as opposed to gobbledegook fantasy), the politics of competing nations, and personal character stories.  This mix is key to why the show is so great.  This is a compelling drama and exciting speculative fiction at its best.  I love this show so much!!  (My full review of season four will be coming soon.)

1. Shrinking season 1 — I adored this first season of Shrinking!!  The show was created by Bill Lawrence (who created Scrubs and co-createdTed Lasso),along with Ted Lasso star and writer Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel.  Shrinking captures much of the essence of why I’ve loved Ted Lasso so much.  It’s a very funny show that can be raunchy, but at the same time it’s a deeply warm-hearted and life-affirming show.  As the season progressed, the show demonstrated enormous empathy for all of its characters, and I grew to know and love every member of this show’s wonderful ensemble.  This is a very special, magical balance for a show to be able to find, and it’s why I loved this show so much.  Also: what a cast!!!  Let’s start with Harrison Ford.  I cannot emphasize enough what an enormous pleasure it is to love a Harrison Ford on-screen performance again.  Harrison Ford is one of the great movie-stars of all time, and he’s portrayed some of the most iconic characters ever created (Han Solo, Harrison Ford, Jack Ryan, etc.).  And yet… it’s been at least twenty years since I’ve last really enjoyed an on-screen Harrison Ford performance.  He’s seemed stiff and bored in so much of what he’s done in recent years.  And so “bowled away” doesn’t begin to sum up my reaction to his spectacular performance here.  Mr. Ford is loose and lovable and extremely funny.  He still has that gruff Harrison Ford grumpiness, but it’s perfectly deployed here for enormous comedic effect; it’s absolutely joyous to watch.  Jason Segel is, as always, a magnificent performer, able to balance his incredible comedic chops with a dramatic realism and naturalism to capture the emotional heft needed.  Then there is Jessica Williams as Gaby, and Luke Tennie as Sean, Lukita Maxwell as Alice, Michael Urie as Brian, Christa Miller as Liz, Ted McGinley as Liz’s newly-retired husband Derek… I love every single one of those characters!!  What a stacked cast this show has!!  The show has crafted a beautiful ensemble, and a world that I love being a part of.  I miss it terribly and can’t wait for more.  In a year with a lot of incredible TV, this was an easy choice for my favorite series of the year.  (Click here for my full review.)

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed my picks!  I’m just getting warmed up… I’ll be back next week with my list of my favorite movies of 2023!!

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