2023 was one hell of a tumultuous year for the entertainment industry, but that didn’t stop it from being chock-full of incredible television. Streaming originals had a strong showing, but HBO and FX kept linear channels in the running (even if they both have direct-to-streaming options themselves). Netflix and HBO — and Max, or whatever they’re calling their streaming service these days — were tied with the most nominations for our best TV show of the year award, with each of them bringing in three a piece. Disney+, Prime Video, Paramount+, and Peacock filled in the rest.
For this year’s IGN Awards, we had 12 shows nominated for best of the year. We’ll get into the winner and runners-up here very shortly, but first we want to acknowledge honorable mentions Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Barry, The Mandalorian, Loki, Reservation Dogs and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. They didn’t get enough votes to make it to the top, but damn were they great anyway.
Runner-Up: Poker Face Has Beef
Ok, Poker Face doesn’t really have Beef, but the two did pull off a tie to squeak into our list of runners-up. Usually, we’d hold a runoff vote to break the tie, but in this case we felt that both shows were incredible and worth highlighting.
Poker Face features a killer cast led by the one and only Natasha Lyonne, who highlights her character Charlie Cale’s smarts in each murder-of-the-week style episode. Creator Rian Johnson continues to showcase his love for the murder mystery genre with another whip-smart set of stories, this time in the form of a television series.
There might not be any connective tissue between Poker Face and Beef, but the Netflix series shines just as bright. Featuring incredible performances by Ali Wong as Amy Lau and Stephen Yeun as Danny Cho, the two comedians play off each other in an unplanned war that leads to some pretty incredible revelations.
Runner-Up: Gen V
Fine, Beef’s revelations weren’t as big as the accidental reveal of who Yeun would be playing in the Thunderbolts movie, but our next runner-up belongs to a different set of messed-up heroes. Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters’ Gen V might be a spinoff in Eric Kripke’s The Boys universe, but the series manages to turn the relatively young franchise on its head a little by introducing something as simple as the belief that things can be better. Still messed up, of course… but better.
Showcasing the talents of Jaz Sinclair as Marie Moreau, Chance Perdomo as Andre Anderson, Lizzie Broadway as Emma Meyer, Maddie Phillips as Cate Dunlap, Asa Germann as Sam Riordan, and London Thor and Derek Luh as Jordan Li, Gen V follows a group of Supes as they try to navigate college life as the generation that was unceremoniously slipped Compound V by their parents in order to create the next generation of heroes. But, where The Boys offers the bleak cynicism of Billy Butcher, Gen V benefits from the tempered hope of Marie and her complicated new family.
Runner-Up: The Fall of the House of Usher
The Ushers might take the cake so far as complicated families go, though. At first glance, it’s logical for folks to assume that Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher is simply an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name. But there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Rather than simply adapt one of Poe’s short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher either pays homage to or directly adapts several of them. The list of Poe references is actually quite extensive, and all of them are bundled up to create one of Flanagan’s best works yet.
Centering on a confession between big pharma billionaire Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and the honorable detective Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), The Fall of the House of Usher builds an entire world around a tête-à-tête between two impeccable actors. Of course, Greenwood and Lumbly are joined by a considerable number of Flanagan’s stable of actors, including impeccable performances from Carla Gugino and Kate Siegel.
At its core, Flanagan’s most recent haunting tale asks the true value of a dollar, and whether riches come from cold hard cash or if the richest man in the world is simply one who remembered to love. The result is, as is often the case with Flanagan’s work, beautiful.
Runner-Up: The Bear
Fraught with the same level of chaos as The Fall of the House of Usher but infinitely more tense is FX’s The Bear. The “Sophomore Slump” is a notorious issue for second seasons of critically acclaimed TV shows, but there’s no such thing to be seen in Christopher Storer’s restaurant drama. The Bear Season 2 pulled out all of the stops, especially when it came to characters like Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). But each character gets their time in the sun as Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy continues his slow spiral into madness as what he loves most continues to eviscerate his mental health.
The episode “Fishes” gets the most love out of Season 2, as it offers a glimpse into Carmy and the dysfunctional Berzatto family while continuing to drive home the notion that mental illness runs in their family, but don’t sleep on the utterly remarkable “Forks.” While the former gives us a look at the family as a whole, the latter offers the audience a moment to really understand and, by proxy, fall in love with the complicated — and often infuriating — Richie.
Though, regrettably, no one is stabbed in the ass this season.
Runner-Up: The Last of Us
Stabbings are pretty handy when you’re dealing with zombies and don’t want to waste ammo, though notably less funny. There might be no such thing as the “video game adaptation curse,” but The Last of Us went and surprised us anyway. The series follows Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they head west to help create a cure via Ellie’s blood amidst the apocalypse. But, like all apocalypse stories, The Last of Us is at its best when it is focusing on the humanity left in the world rather than the atrocities that follow the destruction of society.
“Long, Long Time” shattered our hearts as it showed us the lives of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). In a classic “the hard one falls for the soft one” romance trope, the curmudgeonly old Bill falls in love with the bright and hopeful Frank, all the while ripping our hearts out one love song at a time.
Of course, love will be a continued theme in the series. We close Season 1 with Joel telling Ellie an unbearable lie, all because he’s learned to love again. And, like with Bill and Frank, Joel and Ellie help The Last of Us showcase how much successful adaptations need to evolve and grow from the source material rather than giving a simple page-for-page (or frame-for-frame) copy of a different medium.
Winner: Succession
Succession wowed fans with its final season, sticking the landing and giving satisfying closure in ways many series could only hope to. The show turned everything on its head by delivering that shocking twist in Episode 3 (if you’ve managed to avoid this spoiler this long we are both proud and impressed), which meant even the series’ most devout fans had no idea where things could possibly end up by the time the actual finale came seven episodes later.
The Roy Family most certainly give the Ushers a run for their money when it comes to the worst of the worst of corporate scum, but incredible performances from the leads Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Alan Ruck and Jeremy Strong kept viewers engaged in their story throughout the show’s tenure. Obviously, all of these characters were monsters, but they were our monsters, dammit!
Succession may be over, but Jesse Armstrong really created something special with RoyCo and the little demons he had running it. (A/N: if you’ve never watched Succession, please note that the Roy family are not, in fact, literal demons. Though now we kind of want to see that show happen…)
And that’s that on the Best TV Show for the 2023 IGN Awards! It was stiff competition for the big prize, with even our honorable mentions being heavy hitters in the entertainment space for the year. Will the strikes result in fewer options in 2024? Will the competition be just as stiff as major hitters like House of the Dragon and Rings of Power return to our screens? Time will tell! One thing’s for sure, no matter who took home the prize this year, or whoever may do so the next, we’re the real winners for getting all of these incredible shows.
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December 14, 2023 at 10:00PM
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The Best TV Show of 2023 - IGN
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