5 Favorite Episodes: 2023

It’s time for my longest-standing End of Year tradition: highlighting my favorite episodes of the year.

Film is an in-and-out trip, while TV stays in our lives for day-long bingethons, weeks, and years as seasons stretch on. Episodes are the smallest unit of TV, and at their best they tell stories that are both individual and part of a grander narrative. They’re like great soccer players, you can appreciate their singular greatness but only in the context of a team setting.

So every year I make a list of my 5 favorites (here’s 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 if you’re a Skip Intro completist I guess). The only rule: each show can only have one entry.

5. “Church and State” — Succession (HBO)

Look, I didn’t love the last season of Succession nearly as much as others, but there were still a lot of banger episodes to pick from this year. My pick is Church and State, partially because I think the story would have been better if it just ended here, and partly because I think it’s the episode that really defines the series, as they all finally grapple with who Logan really was to them.

The Roy siblings would all be nothing without Logan. They wouldn’t have been born without Logan, they wouldn’t have power or wealth, and we wouldn’t be watching them. In short, they simply would not matter. The only reason we’ve ever cared about the Roy children is that they have so much power and wealth that their familial dysfunction has enormous consequences for the entire world. And Logan is the source of 98% of that dysfunction.

To Logan, the Roy children owe everything—even if they are miserable beyond belief—and know that it is because of Logan. Watching the family grapple with this history is what makes the episode tick, inside an ornate Catholic church (an institution with a notoriously uncomplicated history), while the world just on the other side of the doors descends into chaos following Kendall’s choice to announce a fascist as president before the votes had been counted. The juxtaposition of their complicated, but ultimately comfortable, family baggage with the tremendous harm they have caused to make themselves feel like winners is powerful. So powerful in fact, that the show would have been greatly improved by ending it here, with Roman being swallowed up by an angry mob, their circle of privilege smashed by their own callousness, greed, and insecurity.

4. “How To Work Out” — How To with John Wilson (HBO)

How To with John Wilson was always more about “why” than “how.” In order to understand how to do something, you have to clarify the question. Why do you want to learn how to do that? What need will it fulfill? Those questions are much more likely to provide a meaningful answer than simply showing you how to accomplish a discrete task.

There is no shortage of gym tutorials and workouts online. There are millions of fitness influencers who have all carved out their specific niche, from flexibility, to weight loss, to strength training, to confidence building. The niche that John seems like he’ll explain in this episode is that of “anxious and reluctant” which, while relatable, is also a perspective that has been endlessly dissected in “how to” articles.

Instead, this episode quickly pivots into the bigger and more interesting questions—Why do we work out? Is it for hubris? Is it for fitness? Is it to be physically capable of pulling off the largest terrorist attack on American soil?

Or is it more about accomplishing a task? To achieve fitness, look “better,” and be recognized for that progress? Are we doomed to be left empty by our modest achievements? Or can we learn to actually love the process of something? To celebrate the act, rather than the result?

Through his trademark roundabout way, John ends up at a pumpkin growing competition, where gardeners try to get their pumpkin as big and juicy as possible. But what resonates with John is the way these people prioritize the process, rather than the discrete accomplishment. It’s not about achieving the perfect physique, it’s about trying to do just a little bit better than before, and to enjoy doing the thing, rather than having the thing.

3. “The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride” — Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix)

“I met an onryō once.”

In Japanese mythology an onryō is a wrathful spirit, the ghost of someone (often a woman) who has been wronged and seeks revenge in death. “The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride” explores how the fascinating ways in which this myth maps onto Blue Eye Samurai’s central character, Mizu, through three parallel stories.

While it’s impossible to map our current gender constructs and trans-ness onto 17th Century Japan (nobody is about to introduce themselves with their pronouns in Edo, so I’ll be using she/her like most articles about this show), Mizu is a woman living a man’s life in her quest for vengeance. She seeks to kill every white man who could have possibly been her father, embarking on a path of blood that could only be carried out by a monster.

At the same time, this episode explores her backstory, specifically the heartbreaking story of finding happiness living as a woman married to a man, only to be rejected and betrayed. In marriage, she largely forgets her quest, cultivating a peaceful life of raising horses. But when her husband rejects her more masculine side, he betrays her, and we see the birth of a proper onryō—the tragic death of a woman and birth of a monster set on ruthless retribution.

This backstory is intercut with Mizu’s last stand at Madame Kaji’s brothel, where Mizu slaughters the gang known as The Thousand Claws, even using the weapon her former husband showed her. The amount of violence she commits is jaw dropping, even in self-defense, seemingly driven by the pain of her past and anger over who she is: a mixed-race outsider.

Intricately woven, the episode ends not with Mizu but with Princess Akemi, who Mizu betrayed in much the same way her husband betrayed her. While the two find common ground and acceptance in each other, Mizu is simply too consumed with her quest for blood to choose a different path. As Akemi watches a puppet show depicting the myth of the onryō, she can’t help but think of Mizu, and the monster she has become.

2. "Awake" — Servant (AppleTV+)

I’m not sure there was a more well-directed episode than Servant’s penultimate “Awake,” directed by the man, the myth, the legend: M. Night Shyamalan. From the eerie music, to the sound design of the deafening storm outside, to the creepy shots that leave looming threats just out of focus or filtered through a rainy window, the episode is a masterclass in building tension and fear while nothing is actually happening on screen.

For the show’s arc and story, this is the most important episode of the series, centered around a long-awaited realization for Dorothy. And, boy, does the episode deliver, culminating in a slow 73-second push in on Lauren Ambrose’s face (with some zooming out to make the surroundings look as disorienting as possible). Ambrose’s performance in this episode is one of the very best of the year, and the entire episode hinges on her face and her expression as she learns the truth and the following decision she must make.

Beyond this shot alone, a huge chunk of this episode takes place inches from her face, with us only being able to interpret what’s happening around her by Ambrose’s reaction. The ending is powerful as well, with an angel and devil on Dorothy’s shoulders as she makes her ultimate decision, one that brings with it the end of everything.

1. “Forks” — The Bear (Hulu)

The second season of The Bear is pretty different from the first. As the restaurant prepares for its grand re-opening and rebrand, Carmy sends everyone out on a series of apprenticeships, to learn the finer points of service.

The 7th episode, “Forks” focuses on Richie, the townie who never left The Beef. He’s a stubborn and angry man, who has watched his best friend die by suicide, his marriage collapse, and his life pass him by as he remains stuck in the same place, even as others change around him. The rebrand of The Beef into The Bear threatens him perhaps more than any other character, not just because he is woefully unprepared to work at a Michelin star restaurant, but also because of the amount of personal resonance he has with the sandwich shop. When The Beef becomes The Bear, will there even be a place for Richie in it? After all, he’s already been replaced as second-in-command by sous chef Sydney, and now they’re entering a world in which he doesn’t belong.

And as Richie begins his apprenticeship as a server in an upscale restaurant, he feels immediately depressed. He feels even more out of place than before, waking up before the crack of dawn to clean forks, individually, by hand. To top it off, Richie buys Taylor Swift tickets for his daughter and ex-wife Tiffany in hopes of a kind of reconciliation, only to find out that Tiffany is engaged to someone else (while he still wears his wedding ring).

I didn’t like Richie much in the first season of The Bear. He demanded respect while refusing to hand it out. But this episode brought that dynamic into focus for me—it’s not that he didn’t respect those around him, it’s that he didn’t respect himself. He believed that he was unworthy and thus overcompensated by acting as though he was better than everyone else.

And this change of scenery proves to be exactly what he needs. He buys into a new pecking order, and finds something in the way the staff cares so deeply about its service and craft, culminating in the best Taylor Swift needledrop I’ve ever heard, with Richie blasting “Love Story” in his car, deciding to find a way in the world rather than fighting it all himself.

Carmy didn’t send him here to banish him or pawn him off, he did it because he saw what Richie could be all along.