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

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

And now let’s begin my TOP TEN FAVORITE TV Series of 2023…!

10. Futurama season 11 — In an incredible turn of events, Futurama has returned from the dead — YET AGAIN!! — this time on Hulu, returning for a wonderful eleventh season consisting of ten all-new episodes.  It makes me so happy that the show has once again found a way to continue. It’s not easy to bring a TV show back to life after a long pause.  Futurama has been off the air for ten years!!  As we’ve all seen in the last few years, reboots/relaunches of once-popular TV shows fail far more than they succeed.  And so it is a double miracle that these ten new episodes of Futurama feel wonderfully perfect.  It’s as if no time has passed.  This is an incredible achievement.  Highlights of this new season include a terrific Dune homage, Zapp Branigan getting cancelled, the evil “Momazon” company comeing perilously close to attaining complete control of all human civilization, and the mind-bending finale  “All the Way Down,” in which the Professor creates a simulation of the entire universe and everyone in-it… and then the Professor in that universe creates another simulation of that universe…  I love this show!  (Click here for my full review of season eleven.)

9. Ahsoka — I never ever dreamed that we’d get to see Ahsoka in live-action, let alone that someday she’d be the lead of her own live-action TV show.  And that her show would be a stealth sequel to the wonderful Star Wars: Rebels??  Wow!!  I have loved watching Ahsoka’s gradual development throughout Dave Filoni’s animated Star Wars shows.  By the time they completed the four-part finale of The Clone Wars, Ahsoka was probably my favorite character in all of Star Wars!  What a fun secret Ahsoka and so many of the other characters on Rebels were — amazing characters who were critical to the broader Star Wars story, but who were at that point completely unknown to the general audience who’d only seen the live-action shows.  It was a thrill to see these characters brought into live action (Hera! Chopper! Sabine! Ezra! Thrawn! Jacen! Lothcats! Pergil! Even Ryder Azati!!) and to get a continuation of their stories.  The show looked amazing, with a number of incredible action sequences, and the music was terrific.  I loved all the new characters (particularly Baylan Skoll, beautifully embodied by the late Ray Stevenson).  Seeing Hayden Christensen playing Anakin, interacting with Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka — in the World Between Worlds, no less!!! — was a thrill.  Really the show’s only flaw was the way it just stopped at the end of the eighth and final episode.  For a show without an announced second season, I was stunned the stories didn’t get more of a resolution by the end of the season.  I hope we get a second season before too long.  (Click here for my full review.)

8. The Bear season 2 — OK, now we’re into the highest tier of my list.  Frankly, any of these next three shows could have been in my top five… and were even in the running for my favorite series of the year!!  (You’ll have to come back tomorrow to see what beat them.)  I loved the first season of The Bear, and I was surprised and delighted that season two was as good, if not better, than that first season!!  I thought we’d cut ahead to the reopening of the new restaurant, so that we’d get lots more sequences of the tense life in the kitchen of a working restaurant.  Those scenes were the hallmark of season one.  So I was surprised, but pleasantly so, that instead, this entire season tells the story of the gang’s very difficult and complicated work to try to reopen their restaurant.  That proved to be a wonderful fountain of stories that were very different from (but still of a piece with) the stories told in season one.  I was blown away by the super-sized episode six, “Fishes” (almost an hour and a half, about triple the length of an average episode), that flashed back to show us a Christmas dinner with Carmy and his family, about five years before the events of the series.  It was incredible to see the entire ensemble gathered together, including the return of Jon Bernthal as Mikey.  And we got some incredible guest-stars, most notably Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s mother Donna, who delivers a knock-out, scene-commanding performance.  But the true miracle of this season was how thoroughly they managed to redeem the character of Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).  Watching this season’s episodes, I developed so much empathy for Richie and everything he’d been through, and the pivotal episode seven, “Forks”, did an incredible job of showing us Richie’s discovery (or was it a rediscovery?) of his own self-respect and self-worth.  What an amazing episode of TV.  I love this show!!  (Click here for my full review of season two.)

7. Ted Lasso season 3 — I still hope that we’ll eventually get to see more of these characters, but if season three is indeed the end, I’m OK with that.  These three seasons of this show have been a thrill and a pleasure from start to finish.  In this third season, the show continued to be a near-perfect balance of funny and sweet.  Ted Lasso has a positive, life-affirming ethos that makes it so joyful to watch.  I love these characters, and this season allowed for us to get to more deeply know so many of this show’s ridiculously deep bench of supporting characters.  Seriously, Ted Lasso has so many supporting characters I know and love; it reminds me of The Simpsons in its prime.  This season was filled with so many amazing, incredible moments: “Let Ted be Ted” at the press conference, Roy and Jamie riding bicycles around Amsterdam, the gang singing “Don’t worry… about a thing” on the bus, meeting Sam’s father and Jamie’s mom and Ted’s mom, Will impersonating Coach Beard, Roy Kent yelling “whistle!”, Colin’s coming out, Higgins dropping a hilarious Willy Wonka-related truth bomb on Rebecca, and so much more.  I wish I’d been more satisfied with how the show’s various romantic relationships (especially Roy and Keeley) worked out in the end, and I wish Nate’s turn back to redemption had been handled better — had I felt more satisfied with the resolutions of those stories, this show would have been higher on my list, maybe even number one.  As it stands, it’s a season that’s a little shaggier than I’d hoped, but still magnificently entertaining TV from start to finish.  (Click here for my full review of season three.)

6. Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4 — Holy cow I can’t believe this show didn’t make it into my top ten!  I love this show so much!!  It’s an oasis of greatness amongst the mostly mediocre-to-terrible junk that passes as modern Star Trek.  (With one notable exception, which I’ll discuss tomorrow…!)  Lower Decks is a comedy, but it’s not a spoof — it tells serious, canonical new Star Trek stories, following the adventures and misadventures of four “lower deckers” on the U.S.S. Cerritos, a small Federation starship in the 24th century (the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager).  Lower Decks is clearly made by a group of people (led by creator and show-runner Mike McMahon) who are huge Trek fans.  Their deep knowledge of, and love and respect for, Star Trek shines through in every single moment of this show, and it gives me enormous pleasure to see.  At this point in the run of the show, I deeply love all of these characters!  Not just the main foursome, but all the other supporting characters!  It was a great twist to have our group of four ensigns promoted to lieutenants (albeit lieutenants junior grade) at the start of this season.  The show got a lot of mileage out of exploring the repercussions of that, and how each of the four main characters responded to this change in their lives.  I was blown away by the genius way in which the show, this season, finally connected to the TNG episode from which it got its name, and bringing back Robert Duncan McNeil to reprise his character of Nova Squad leader Nick Locarno (from the TNG episode “The First Duty”) was an incredible move.  This show is pure joy; I hope it runs for many, many more seasons…!!!  (Click here for my full review of season four.)

Thanks for reading!  I hope you’ll all come back tomorrow to see my FIVE FAVORITE TV series of 2023…!!!

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