A Spy Among Friends (TV Program)

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    Best TV Episodes of 2023

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    “Bob’s Burgers,” “Frontline,” “Killing It” and “A Spy Among Friends” were among the series that gave us some of the best episodes of television this year.Great TV series can run for dozens or hundreds of hours, but we still experience them a piece at a time. This list is dedicated to those pieces: a handful of the best episodes that Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I saw in a year of professional viewership.As usual, this list isn’t comprehensive — it wouldn’t be if it were 10 times as long. And as usual, I avoided repeating shows that were on my Best of 2023 list. So I could have, but didn’t, include standout installments from “The Last of Us” (“Long, Long Time”), “Succession” (“Connor’s Wedding”) and “The Bear” (for me, “Forks” not “Fishes,” nothing against the latter). Consider it a starting point, and feel free to add your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Australian Survivor’Season 8, Episode 7: ‘Return of the King’“Australian Survivor” has been outplaying the U.S. version for a while now, and nowhere was that more evident than in this jaw-dropping episode from the “Heroes vs. Villains” season. The episode’s final tribal council featured a masterstroke of psychological manipulation by George Mladenov, or “King George,” who emerged as one of the most telegenic antagonists of any version of the show. American “Survivor” is still a delight, but this iteration currently wears the crown. (Streaming on 10play.) PONIEWOZIK‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 14, Episode 2: ‘The Amazing Rudy’It’s a rare comedy that can maintain quality, and even improve, going into its 14th season. It’s an even rarer one that, this long into its run, can pull off a striking and effective departure from form like this side-character spotlight. Shunting the Belcher family to the wings for most of the episode, this half-hour dove into the family history of the anxious grade-schooler Regular-Sized Rudy (voiced by Brian Huskey) as he searched for a magic trick that could save an awkward dinner with his divorced parents. Funny, poignant and ultimately uplifting, “The Amazing Rudy” showed that this burger joint can pull off a distinctive special of the week. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIKA scene from the “Amelia” episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” where Louise takes a class assignment personally.Fox‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 13, Episode 22: ‘Amelia’You could fill this list with episodes of “Bob’s Burgers”; from the past 12 months, “The Plight Before Christmas” and “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” also come to mind. The Season 13 finale typified the Fox comedy’s embrace of eccentricity, individuality and generosity of spirit, as the compulsively competitive fourth-grader Louise (Kristen Schaal) agonized over a multimedia report on her hastily chosen hero, Amelia Earhart. Her eventual triumph was a satisfying and gently comic victory for all ambitious, difficult, undervalued girls and women. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALE’Carol & the End of the World’Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Sisters’To the burgeoning genre of big-hearted apocalypse stories (“Station Eleven,” “The Last of Us”) add this adult animated series, set in the months before a looming planetary collision, which arrived too late for my annual best-TV list. Through a series of home-video snippets, this episode follows the introverted Carol (Martha Kelly) on a hiking trip with her exuberant sister, Elena (Bridget Everett), as the mismatched siblings try to bond before doomsday. (Streaming on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK‘Cunk on Earth’Season 1, Episode 3: ’The Renaissance Will not be Televised’I could probably have picked any of the five ridiculous episodes of this history mockumentary, but I’m partial to the Renaissance installment. In it, Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) walks us through some of the major events between 1440 and 1830 or so, with her dopey and bizarre questions. She and a da Vinci expert look at “The Vitruvian Man,” and she asks, “What’s it for?” In praising the artist’s Last Supper, she marvels, “You almost feel like you could crawl inside it and betray Jesus yourself.” As for the French Revolution, she explains that “The guillotine was specifically designed to be the most humane way to decapitate someone in front of a jeering crowd.” “Cunk” is dorky buffoonery at its best. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSDave Burd, seated, as Dave, with child-actor versions of himself.Byron Cohen/FX‘Dave’Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Harrison Ave.’The fictional-autobiographical FXX comedy about the rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) can be raunchy and scatological and outrageous. This third-season episode, however — well, it was still all that but also insightful and sweet. As the title character returns home to shoot a video about a childhood romance — cast with a slew of child-actor versions of himself as well as his actual young love, now grown up — the ensuing chaos becomes a reflection on celebrity, memory and the responsibilities of memoir. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Extraordinary’Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Surprise!’In “Extraordinary,” everyone on earth gets a superpower on their 18th birthday; Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 and hasn’t gotten hers yet. While the humiliation and confusion she feels about this drives some of the show, it is secondary to the loving but bickering friendship with her roommate and bestie, her tense relationship with her mother and her budding romance with a shape-shifter who entered her life as a stray cat. This all comes to a head in the season finale, when a big, messy party pulls together all the show’s quirky characters and plot lines — and then just when things are feeling happy and resolved, it ends with a perfect record-scratch twist. Ah, the best kind of hurts so good. (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONSIn a scene from “Frontline,” the photographer Evgeniy Maloletka picks his way through the aftermath of a Russian attack in Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2022.Mstyslav Chernov/Associated Press‘Frontline’Season 42, Episode 5: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’This unaffectedly brutal documentary, filmed by the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, belongs on every list of the year’s best movies; through the good offices of “Frontline,” which was involved in its production, it can be included here. In backyards, on debris-strewn streets and in the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital, Chernov records the anger, despair and utter bewilderment of Ukrainian civilians during the early days of the Russian invasion. And as he and his team sprint across open areas and hunker down in flimsy stairwells, he narrates their desperate efforts to get the news to the world. (Streaming on PBS.org.) HALE’Killing It’Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Mallory’Claudia O’Doherty gave one of 2023’s best comedic performances in Peacock’s capitalism satire, as Jillian Glopp, a gig worker turned partner in a struggling saw palmetto farm. In the second season’s second episode, the theft of her beloved car — a budget Kia she’s named “Mallory” — cracks her sweet disposition, turning her into a raging vengeance seeker and unleashing the frustration of years scraping by in a dog-eat-dog economy. O’Doherty filters her character’s crackup through a blazing beam of Aussie sunshine. (Streaming on Peacock.) PONIEWOZIK‘A Spy Among Friends’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Snow’Alexander Cary’s miniseries dramatizing the last days of friendship between the traitorous British spy Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) and his fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) emphasized subtle, complex psychology over spy craft (though it had that too). This may be why it didn’t receive the notice it should have. The penultimate episode, in which the full dimensions of Philby’s downfall became apparent, was — like the entire series — a clinic in naturalistic acting by Lewis, Pearce and their co-star Anna Maxwell Martin. (Streaming on MGM+.) HALEIn its attempts to understand some of the victims, Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events more opaque.Hulu‘Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence’Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Larryland’Everything about the case of the middle-aged dad Lawrence V. Ray and the group of bright young college students he drew into a cultlike miasma of mind control, sexual exploitation and indentured servitude is hard to fathom. Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events both more comprehensible and, in its attempts to understand some of the victims, more opaque and mysterious. The final episode, which came out during Ray’s trial (he is serving a 60-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes), was a heartbreaking, mesmerizing summation of the case’s contradictions. (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Telemarketers’Part 1From its opening moments, HBO’s “Telemarketers” is all about shaggy veracity: When we meet our protagonists, Sam Lipman-Stern (also one of the show’s directors) is shirtless in bed, and Patrick J. Pespas is high in the front seat of a car. The two worked together at a telemarketing company, small cogs in a despicable grift, but the office itself is home to real camaraderie — and real chaos, thanks in part to pervasive drug use. Lipman-Stern’s grainy footage from his teenage years captures the outrageousness of his workplace but also Pespas’s intense, charismatic vitality. While the subsequent episodes expose more of the telemarketing industry’s shadiest work, the first installment is an instant, startling immersion into its subjects’ perspectives. (Streaming on Max.) LYONSHaley J in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series with a mother and daughter match that includes folding chairs. Netflix‘Wrestlers’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Mother’There are dozens of poignant, personal moments in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series about a low-level professional wrestling league. Humor, passion, ambition — plenty of all of those, too. But one episode is a genuine jaw-dropper, and its climax is a death match between a mother and daughter. Marie was a young mom and went to jail while her daughter, Haley, was a child. They never really reconciled, but now they’re in the same wrestling league, where Marie is a doting veteran and Haley, now also a young mother herself, a fast-rising star. Marie says Haley is a “carbon copy” of her; Haley does not see it that way. But they both like turning one kind of pain into another kind of pain, and they bring all their anger and grief into the ring. They also bring folding chairs, a trash-can lid and thousands of thumbtacks, and by the end of the match, they’re both battered, and Marie’s face is covered in blood. It is perhaps the most visceral catharsis I have ever seen. (Streaming on Netflix.) LYONS More

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      Best TV Shows of 2023

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      Series like “The Bear,” “Beef,” “Happy Valley,” “Reservation Dogs” and “Succession” dazzled in a year when much of the TV business was in disarray.Best Shows of 2023 | Best International | Best Shows That EndedJames PoniewozikBest Shows of 2023TV in 2023 was like synchronized swimming. Below the surface, there was roiling and churn. The writers’ and actors’ strikes wiped out much of the production year. The hangover from the corporate binge on streaming platforms led to cancellations and cutbacks. A number of hall-of-fame series left the air, with no clear plan of, as it were, succession.But above the waterline, the dance went on. As usual, it was challenging to whittle down my year-end list to 10. (So I picked 11.) As usual, I am listing it in alphabetical, not ranked order. As usual, I made it a rule not to repeat shows from the previous year, and as usual, I broke that rule. (I couldn’t not include “Reservation Dogs.”)And as usual, I probably missed stuff: I have the same number of hours in the day as you, even if I spend more of them in front of a screen. Herewith, the best of what I did see, for your catching-up pleasure. Even if Peak TV is dead, Off-Peak TV should keep us plenty busy.‘The Bear’ (FX)When “The Americans” was on the air, I used to say that it was good it came first on my list alphabetically, because it was probably the series I would rank No. 1 if pushed. Now “The Bear” has that pride of place (at least until “Abbott Elementary” makes it back on my list). After a much-hyped 2022 premiere, the restaurant dramedy leveled up, exploring the volcanic dysfunction of its central family and celebrating the care and feeding of guests as a quasi-spiritual calling. This show is cooking with gas. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Beef’ (Netflix)Steven Yeun in “Beef,” which used a road rage incident to explore many different modern tensions.Andrew Cooper/Netflix“Beef” was a good story about people getting mad: Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), whose road-rage encounter descends into a quagmire of terrible choices. But it was a great story about why people get mad. It unpeeled the blazing onion of their conflict to expose class differences, family resentments and inter- and intragroup tensions among its Asian American characters, in an unsparing but empathetic telling. A big enough collection of last straws, “Beef” said, can build a highly flammable house. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘The Curse’ (Showtime)Like the mirrored eco-houses that its two lead characters build, “The Curse” is a polarizing creation. The collaboration between Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, with a stunning performance by Emma Stone, is deeply uncomfortable. It is also an entrancing, original, astute, creepy — and funny! — study of guilt, marriage and benighted altruism. Enter this haunted house if you dare, but watch your step. (Streaming on Paramount+.)‘Dead Ringers’ (Amazon Prime Video)We’d have been just fine without so many remakes, reboots and adaptations in 2023. “Dead Ringers” was a bloody, brilliant exception. Rachel Weisz — playing twin gynecologists in a gender-swapped version of the Jeremy Irons film role — and the writer Alice Birch delivered a truly distinctive reimagining of this story that kept the body horror while adding a contemporary take on scientific hubris and big-money medicine. (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)‘I’m a Virgo’ (Amazon Prime Video)Boots Riley’s Brobdingnagian satire was both fabulistic and fabulous. Through the misadventures and explorations of Cootie (a marvelous Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot-tall teen in Oakland, Riley personified the idea of the young Black man as threat, while spinning a wild, political and relentlessly entertaining tale that incorporated superhero mythology and anticapitalist critique. The series strained to control its outsized ambitions, but it was proof that you can never aim too big. (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)‘Jury Duty’ (Amazon Freevee)Like a jury summons, this innovative reality-comedy was a surprise. But in this case, it was a pleasant one. An unsuspecting citizen, Ronald Gladden, was called to serve on a fictional case, joining a jury of his fake peers played by actors (as well as the actor James Marsden, playing himself). Miraculously, the production pulled off the elaborate “trial” without blowing its cover. And marvelously, what might have sounded like a cruel joke turned out to be a feel-good, hilarious test of decency, in which Gladden, er, acquitted himself with charm and integrity. (Streaming on Amazon Freevee.)‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Somebody Somewhere’ (HBO)You might think that a thriller about a fungal zombie apocalypse has nothing in common with a slice-of-life account of friendships, queer life and cabaret music. But these very different HBO series showcased two of 2023’s great duos. (Each of them involving a Joel!) In “Last of Us,” Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey starred as Joel and Ellie, an odd couple forced to consider what they would sacrifice for endangered humanity. Season 2 of “Somewhere” tested the bond of Sam (Bridget Everett) and Joel (Jeff Hiller) in an endearing story of heartland eccentrics. One series splattered more guts than the other, but each had heart to spare. (Streaming on Max.)‘Reservation Dogs’ (FX)From left, Paulina Alexis, Devery Jacobs, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor and Elva Guerra in “Reservation Dogs,” which ended this year.Shane Brown/FXIt is fitting that the final season of this comedy, set on a Native reservation in Oklahoma, had a story line involving extraterrestrial life. This was a story of a small community that, over its three seasons, managed to fill an entire universe. A rare coming-of-age story that does as well by its elder characters as its young leads, it left me with my heart brimming and my eyes wanting more. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘South Side’ (Max)What is a “year,” really? Yes, eagle-eyed readers will note that the final season of this comedy aired at the end of 2022, but it arrived too late for my previous list. Over a too-short, three-season run, “South Side” expanded a workplace comedy about a Chicago rent-to-own shop into a fantastical universe of eccentrics, scammers and hapless police and pols, and the final season packed years’ worth of ideas into a final blaze of surreal world-building. This was one for the ages, even if it lived on borrowed — or rented — time. (Streaming on Max.)‘Succession’ (HBO)Like the Roy family empire, the final season of this corporate saga dominated all available media. But the saturation coverage was deserved. The drama followed its dark instincts to the end, giving a send-off for the ages to the patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and living up to its title in his heirs fight for his legacy. The C-suite brawl — in which American democracy was collateral damage — managed to be cynically satisfying and deeply emotional. Money could not buy the Roys happiness, but their misery was priceless. (Streaming on Max.)Honorable mention: “Barry” (HBO); “Blue Eye Samurai” (Netflix); “Dave” (FXX); “Happy Valley” (BBC America); “How To With John Wilson” (HBO); “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” (Netflix); “Killing It” (Peacock); “Minx” (Starz); “Mrs. Davis” (Peacock); “Party Down” (Starz); “Scavengers Reign” (Max); “The Traitors” (Peacock).Flawed but fascinating: “Foundation” (Apple TV+); “Hello Tomorrow!” (Apple TV+); “Three-Body” (Rakuten Viki); “The Wheel of Time” (Amazon Prime Video).MIKE HALEBest International ShowsIt cannot be overemphasized: The wild proliferation of series, especially imported ones, makes the word “best” at the top of any list a hazy approximation at, you know, best. Here are 10 shows from outside the United States, in alphabetical order, that I particularly enjoyed in 2023.‘A Spy Among Friends’ (MGM+)“A Spy Among Friends,” with Guy Pearce, left, and Damian Lewis, was based on actual events.Adi Marineci/Sony Pictures TelevisionThis languorous yet nail-biting variation on the espionage thriller dramatized the end of the friendship between Kim Philby, the British spy who was a double agent for the Soviets, and Nicholas Elliott, the fellow spy sent to bring Philby home and then suspected of treason himself when Philby escaped. Written by Alex Cary (“Homeland”) based on Ben Macintyre’s book, it was a smart and complicated puzzle play and an icy dissection of the British class system; most of all, it was a tour de force for Guy Pearce as Philby, Damian Lewis as Elliott and Anna Maxwell Martin as a fictional agent caught in the middle. (Streaming on MGM+.)‘C.B. Strike’ (Max)The rapport between Tom Burke, as the gruff British private eye Cormoran Strike, and Holliday Grainger, as his assistant and then fellow investigator Robin Ellacott, has always been more than enough reason to watch this series based on J.K. Rowling’s Strike mystery novels (written under the name Robert Galbraith). The show’s balance of detection and thorny, soulful friendship-cum-romance is close to ideal; the fifth season, based on Rowling’s book “Troubled Blood,” combined a cluster of family crises with a deft, surprising mystery involving the 40-year-old case of a missing doctor. (Streaming on Max.)‘Happy Valley’ (BBC America)Siobhan Finneran, left, and Sarah Lancashire in “Happy Valley,” which wrapped up this year. Matt Squire/AMCSally Wainwright’s intimate, everyday epic about the life-or-death struggle between a Yorkshire police officer and her nemesis, the blandly brutal sociopath who was also the father of her grandson, reached its reckoning in its third and final season. Sarah Lancashire and James Norton were terrific to the end, along with Siobhan Finneran as the cop’s ruinously, redemptively softhearted sister. (Streaming on AMC+ and Acorn TV.)‘Oshi no Ko’ (Hidive)From idol singing groups to TV dramas, reality-dating shows, anime musicals, modeling, YouTube stardom, performing-arts high schools, celebrity journalism and online trolling, this animated series offers an almost documentary-style account of the wages of success in the Japanese entertainment industry. Because it is a sprightly, goofy anime, its darkly earnest accounts of struggle and exploitation share space with teenage romance and a murder mystery, and its hero and heroine are a young doctor and his teenage patient reincarnated as the twin babies of a pop singer they both idolized. (Streaming on Hidive.)‘Paris Police 1905’ (MHz Choice)The latest winner from the French network Canal+ (progenitor of “Spiral” and “The Bureau”) is a police procedural that doubles as a panorama of French society at a time when overwhelming change barrels into ossified conservatism and privilege. (The first season was titled “Paris Police 1900.”) The plot of the new season of this highly entertaining melodrama, which matches a grisly sang-froid with the driest humor, is driven by syphilis, homophobia and a deadly new menace, the automobile. (Streaming on MHz Choice.)‘Slow Horses’ (Apple TV+)“Slow Horses” had even more twists in its second season. With Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Gary Oldman.Apple TV+The second season of this wonderfully sardonic British series about a cadre of misfit, career-stalled MI5 agents (which premiered on Dec. 2, 2022, after last year’s edition of these lists appeared) was, if anything, better than the first — its mystery twistier, its action more tense and shocking. Season 3, premiering Wednesday, is a slight step back — the bullet count goes way up, which is always a bad sign — but the average of the two seasons is still awfully high. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)‘Somewhere Boy’ (Hulu)In its flashbacks, this compact drama is a dark fable: a bereaved Welsh husband, terrified of also losing his young son, keeps the boy captive by telling him that the world outside their isolated home is populated by monsters. In the present, it’s an astringent coming-of-age story, as Danny (Lewis Gribben), now nearly an adult, emerges into the confusing, disappointing, equally frightening real world. Gribben and Samuel Bottomley, as the cousin suddenly saddled with being Danny’s protector, are excellent. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘30 Coins’ (Max)“It’s all quite incomprehensible,” a character says of events in the second season of Álex de la Iglesia’s apocalyptic theological thriller. “But life is incomprehensible, too.” That’s the correct spirit in which to watch de la Iglesia’s rococo riot of a series about a handful of ordinary, though in some cases extraordinarily attractive people — a small-town mayor, a veterinarian, a lapsed cop, a YouTube ghostbuster — battling Satan, the Vatican, Paul Giamatti (as an L. Ron Hubbard-style cult leader) and possibly God over the fate of the world. (Streaming on Max.)‘Wolf Like Me’ (Peacock)Abe Forsythe’s charming, sometimes extremely bloody Australian dramedy is a moving and tartly comic account of a blended family in which part of the blend is a werewolf. Isla Fisher is enormously appealing as the no-nonsense, highly suspicious wolf, Mary, who spent the second season pregnant by her lumpenly human boyfriend (Josh Gad); the season-ending cliffhanger promises to radically change the show. (Streaming on Peacock.)‘Yosi, the Regretful Spy’ (Amazon Prime Video)The Argentine writer and director Daniel Burman based this absorbing drama on the true story of a government agent who infiltrated the Jewish community of Buenos Aires in the years leading up to the horrific terrorist bombings that targeted that community in the early 1990s. Through two seasons, its depiction of the automatic, paranoiac anti-Semitism of the country’s establishment is all the more chilling for being utterly matter-of-fact. (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)Margaret LyonsBest Shows That EndedThis year brought a few banner finales and a few shows unjustly cut off in their primes, some slow fades and some purposeful but (to a fan) premature endings. So goes my lament each year.To qualify for my list, arranged below in alphabetical order, shows had to air in 2023 (or just about) and also officially end; renewal limbo is the enemy of the fan and the list-maker alike. Miniseries and limited series did not count (God bless, though), and I considered shows in toto, not just their final runs.‘Barry’ (HBO)“Barry,” cocreated by and starring Bill Hader, was by turns both brooding and snappy.Merrick Morton/HBOBill Hader cocreated, starred in and directed most of this assassin black comedy, which was among television’s most brooding and violent shows but still bubbled over with snappy one-liners and zippy satire. The show’s virtuosic action sequences and fight choreography were only part of its appeal, though. Barry discovering a love of and aptitude for acting; his relationship with his grandiose mentor, Gene (Henry Winkler); his abusive romance with Sally (Sarah Goldberg) — all of these marvelous facets refracted light through a dark gem. (Streaming on Max.)‘Doom Patrol’ (Max)The first two seasons of this show are much better than the second two, but, man, they are a ton of fun. While a lot of comic book fare is trite, didactic and redundant, “Doom” was raucous, silly, arch — but with a fairy-tale wistfulness and a real, beating heart. It was filthy and funny, and not particularly attached to always making sense, full of a vibrant strangeness that allowed for both immature humor and richly depicted sorrow and longing. (Streaming on Max.)‘The Great’ (Hulu)Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning starred as Peter III and Catherine the Great in “The Great.”Christian Black/HuluFew shows, if any, wring as much from each fiber of their existence as “The Great” did: Every line, every gesture, every hat, every plate conveyed something rich and thrilling, a ballerina telling an entire tragedy through the tilt of her pinkie. Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult cultivated an electrified sense of menace and then a real but twisted love between Catherine the Great and Peter III. So many period dramas just feel like inert, expensive Wikipedia entries, but “The Great,” through its irreverence and artistry, was alive at every turn. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Happy Valley’ (BBC America)“Happy Valley” debuted in 2014, when the bleak foreign crime show was more in fashion, but it was never strictly a misery-murder show. Sarah Lancashire starred as Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant in West Yorkshire still tormented by her daughter’s suicide and raising her grandson in the shadow of that grief. Where lots of sad cop shows flatten their characters, “Valley” always sought depth and fullness — characters make jokes, the relationships have texture, choices have emotional heft. (Streaming on AMC+ and Acorn TV.)‘How To With John Wilson’ (HBO)This mesmerizing collage series always felt maybe a little too fragile for this harsh world, its tender musings and awkward but reverential curiosity leading to moments of human resonance that were so lovely they were almost painful. John Wilson reassembled his obsessive catalogs of New York City (and occasionally elsewhere) into poems about yearning, growing, belonging, changing — all these snippets of minutiae that would add up to a beautiful, illuminating gut punch. The end of this show stings harder than most because there won’t ever be anything else quite like it. (Streaming on Max.)‘The Other Two’ (Max)Drew Tarver and Heléne Yorke in “The Other Two,” which mocked both fame and its characters’ thirst for it. Greg Endries/MaxOver its three seasons, “The Other Two” was thrillingly catty and cynical while keeping a tiny ember of sweetness burning all the way through. Heléne Yorke and Drew Tarver starred as the older siblings to a teeny-bopper idol who each crave the spotlight in their own ways, too. The show loved mocking their thirst for fame and especially ridiculing the hollowness of much of the entertainment industry and media. The Season 3 episode about a play called “8 Gay Men with AIDS: A Poem in Many Hours” is a particular treat. (Streaming on Max.)‘Reservation Dogs’ (FX)“Reservation Dogs” was so suffused with death and absence, maybe I shouldn’t feel so aggrieved that it is ending after just three seasons. Maybe I should internalize one of the central ideas of the show, that the end of a life is not the end of a relationship. Maybe someday I will be that sanguine, but for now, I’m still bummed out! In its short run, this coming-of-age series about Native American teens in Oklahoma was as gorgeous, surprising and nimble as TV gets — funny and whimsical, daring and important. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Single Drunk Female’ (Freeform)This is one of our unjustly canceled specimens this year, a show cut off mid-blossom. In Season 1, we met Sam (Sofia Black-D’Elia) as she hit rock bottom, moved home with her difficult mother, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and tried to crawl out of her despair. In Season 2, the show, like Sam, found its footing, and its warm approach made grim themes accessible to Freeform’s younger audience and to anyone drained by sad-coms who still wanted something with depth. Adding insult to injury, Disney, which owns Freeform, also pulled the show off its streaming platforms. (Buy it on Amazon Prime Video.)‘South Side’ (Max)This is our asterisk entry this year — “South Side” did not air in 2023, but its third and final season aired in December 2022, after last year’s list went to print, and its cancellation wasn’t official until February of this year. So it is sneaking through on multiple technicalities. Also because it was so dang funny, with among the highest jokes-per-minute rate of any contemporary show. The show, set on the South Side of Chicago, had one of the most fully developed worlds on television, where characters who were onscreen for only a line or two still felt woven in. (Streaming on Max.)‘Succession’ (HBO)From left, Fisher Stevens, Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong and Sarah Snook in the final season of “Succession.”Macall B. Polay/HBOI mean … it’s “Succession.” Bury me in its fine textiles and viciousness, its fascinating ability to depict its characters as piñatas filled with more emptiness, its filthy rejoinders and knack for detail. A show this grand had to go out big, too, and killing off Logan not as its denouement but rather as its 11 o’clock number gave its final batch of episodes a swirling urgency. (Streaming on Max.)Honorable mention: “A Black Lady Sketch Show” (HBO); “Miracle Workers” (TBS); “Painting With John” (HBO); “Sex Education” (Netflix); “Summer Camp Island” (Cartoon Network). More

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      British Spies, Japanese Teens and a German Cop’s Wild Ride

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      Recent international series of note include “A Spy Among Friends” on MGM+ and “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.It has been a quiet season for international television on American screens — nothing has grabbed attention on a “Squid Game” or “Downton Abbey” scale. But barely a day goes by, in the streaming age, without an interesting series washing up from some foreign shore. Here are four recent shows worth tracking down, from an elegant British thriller to a Chinese dramedy about a demon god and an immortal warrior who meet cute on the mortal plane.‘A Spy Among Friends’Alexander Cary, a writer and executive producer on “Homeland,” wrote this six-episode spy thriller as a leisurely, literate, three- or four-dimensional game of chess. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, it tells the story of Kim Philby (and the other high-level Soviet spies known as the Cambridge Five) by focusing on a set of intertwined sparring matches: Philby’s with his friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott, sent to Beirut to bring the disgraced Philby home; Elliott’s with a (fictional) agent, Lily Thomas, assigned to interrogate him when he returns to London alone; and Elliott and Thomas’s with the MI6 hierarchy once he brings her around to his side.Made for the British streaming service ITVX and available here on MGM+ and Prime Video, “A Spy Among Friends” is smart, complicated (at times overly so) and saturated in a particular Cold War blend of tragic romanticism and kitchen-sink class politics. What makes it stand out, though, is its casting. Anna Maxwell Martin and Guy Pearce are excellent as Thomas and Philby, and Damian Lewis is outstanding as Elliott, the colorless spy’s spy whose skills and motives are in question until the end. Tightly controlled yet somehow relaxed, Lewis gives a performance in which the coldblooded manipulator and the sentimentally loyal bro coexist at every moment.Malick Bauer is an East German policeman tossed around by history in “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.Stephan Burchadt/Disney‘Sam: A Saxon’As triumph-of-the-spirit stories go, “Sam: A Saxon” is notably low on triumph. Sam Meffire, the subject of this German biographical mini-series from Hulu, grew up in Dresden, both acutely aware of how his skin color set him apart and fiercely loyal to his East German homeland; shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, he became the country’s first policeman of African descent. His life since then — he’s only 52 — has been a carnival ride that no screenwriter would be likely to dream up: first a poster boy in a national ad campaign designed to humanize the police, and then a fugitive fleeing to Africa to avoid arrest for armed robbery.Jörg Winger, a creator and the showrunner of “Sam,” was also a creator of “Deutschland 83” and its sequels, and the shows share a knack for embedding engaging characters in real-world events in a way that feels both credible and suspenseful. In this dramatized telling, Meffire, played by the imposing actor Malick Bauer, is a true believer who finds himself continually and perversely acted upon by history. He is tossed about by the fall of Communism, and by the ravages of capitalism, racist nationalism and crime that the collapse unleashes. “Sam: A Saxon” stands firm against streaming-video bloat: Its seven episodes barely contain the story it sets out to tell.“Skip and Loafer” presents an expressionistic depiction of the life of a high-school girl.Misaki Takamatsu,KODANSHA/”Skip and Loafer” Production Committee‘Skip and Loafer’This sweet, lightly sentimental slice-of-life anime, halfway through its 12-episode season on Crunchyroll (and available for purchase on Prime Video), is an example of something that Japanese animation provides more consistently than American live-action TV: a comic, even expressionistic depiction of high-school life that still feels unforced and natural. Mitsumi, the star student of her small seaside town, moves to Tokyo to attend an elite prep school. Ferociously single-minded, very impressed with herself and determined to take her new school by storm, she’s also a quick-to-embarrass country bumpkin, a classic setup for teenage comedy.An early scene of Mitsumi’s childhood friends chasing after her departing train is a ruse, a poke at the conventions of this sort of story in traditional anime and Studio Ghibli-style films. And the bending of perspectives continues: While Mitsumi runs a gantlet of welcoming ceremonies, classroom presentations and karaoke parties in Tokyo, we and everyone around her — new friends, old friends and family — can see the anxieties and mortifications that she thinks she is hiding. The show (whose cryptic title, taken from the manga on which the anime is based, probably alludes to Mitsumi and her slacker crush, Sousuke) is a lighthearted essay on loneliness and the life-or-death nature of every decision a 15-year-old makes.In “Till the End of the Moon,” Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu play characters who are entangled across time and space.Rakuten Viki‘Till the End of the Moon’While a demon god is in the process of destroying the world, the resolute mystical warrior Li Susu (Bai Lu) is sent back in time 500 years to find the demon while he is still in mortal form and kill him. Arriving in the kingdom of Sheng, she discovers that she is in the body of a headstrong, very poorly behaved princess who is married to — do I have to spell it out?“Till the End of the Moon,” which is 35 episodes into its 40-episode run on Rakuten Viki, was a major hit in China, where it wrapped up this week; its premiere reportedly drew the highest numbers in three years for a xianxia (immortal heroes) drama. It’s an excellent example of the Chinese streaming-video industry’s capacity for making slickly disposable, highly enjoyable entertainment that combines elements of costume drama and special-effects-laden fantasy action with a healthy portion of romantic comedy. The humor will largely translate for a Western viewer, and Luo Yunxi (“My Sunshine,” “Ashes of Love”), who plays both the annihilating god and the possibly sympathetic human prince, is a hypnotic camera subject. More

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      In ‘A Spy Among Friends,’ B.F.F. Betrayal at an International Level

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      A twisty MGM+ series tells the story of Kim Philby, a British agent secretly working for the Soviet Union, and Nicholas Elliott, his closest friend.“Why wasn’t he in custody?” asks the MI5 officer Lily Thomas. It is January 1963, and Thomas is talking about Kim Philby, a British intelligence agent who, after being exposed as a Soviet spy, has escaped to Moscow. Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s closest friend and a fellow member of the foreign intelligence agency MI6, looks slightly nonplused. “Well, that’s not how we —” he begins, before coming to an abrupt halt.That “we” is at the heart of “A Spy Among Friends,” a six-part series based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, and starring Guy Pearce as Philby, Damian Lewis as Elliott and Anna Maxwell Martin as Thomas. The series, produced by Sony Pictures Television, premieres March 12 on MGM+.It’s the “we” of the old boys’ club, of men bonded by private schools, an Oxbridge education, members-only clubs and the confident assumption of their right to power. The show explores the psychological shock of the realization that a figure considered “one of us” was something quite different all along.“MI6 tended to attract those public schoolboys, people who had no hesitation about bending the rules because they thought they were above the rules,” Macintyre said in a recent interview. “They believed they were born to lead, and they couldn’t imagine that one of their own could be a traitor.”The TV adaptation was written by Alex Cary (“Homeland”) and directed by Nick Murphy (“Blood”). Like the book, it is both a tale of espionage and the story of a friendship and a betrayal that is as personally devastating for Elliott as the political betrayal is for the Western powers.Philby’s story is true: He was one of the Cambridge Five, a group of upper-class Englishmen recruited by the Soviets while in college, and who were eventually, and gradually, unmasked following World War II, after they had been working for the Communist cause from inside British intelligence services for decades.Pearce said that even after playing the character, Philby’s motivations remained an enigma to him.Sam Taylor/Sony Pictures Television“It’s such a well-known story in the U.K., Philby as the most successful traitor of the 20th century,” Lewis said in a video interview from New York. “This is a sneak peek at a more psychological, emotional way of looking at it.”Philby was both Elliott’s best friend and his idol, Lewis said, and Elliott “fatally continued to facilitate his treachery.” Lewis added: “The great tragedy is that he realizes in retrospect that the man he loved and enabled and defended had gotten thousands of people killed.”Macintyre said that he learned about the Philby-Elliott friendship from the novelist John le Carré, who described it to him as “the best unwritten story of the Cold War.” When he began his research, he discovered “comrades in arms who loved each other as much as heterosexual men in Britain could.”“It’s a very intimate treachery,” Macintyre said.The book, full of biographical detail and historical context, wasn’t easy to adapt, Cary said in an interview, adding that Lewis, whom he had worked with on “Homeland,” helped him develop the script and the show’s approach.“We had long, long conversations about the balance between spy-narrative red meat and a story about friendship,” Cary said.He came up with the fictional Thomas, he said, as “a device through which we could engage with Elliott emotionally,” and as an acknowledgment of the various women in Macintyre’s book who are “involved in an unsung way.” He added that he knew introducing a central female character to the story could “be called woke, which is fine with me!”Thomas, with her northern accent and blunt manners, embodies the class differences between MI5 (which investigates matters of national security, like the F.B.I.) and MI6 (the foreign intelligence service, like the C.I.A.). But her character also suggests a redemptive path for Elliott, who gradually becomes aware of her qualities and potential.Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin) is a fictional character, created for the show to help Lewis’s Elliott along a redemptive path. Sony Pictures Television“She represents what has to change in British society, but also has to play as a real person,” Maxwell Martin said in an interview. Thomas is there, she said, “to serve a narrative — someone who will cleave open Elliott’s mind and his subtleties, his emotional brain and his heartbreak, and someone who would challenge what happened in Beirut.”Beirut, where both men had been stationed, is where the final confrontation between Elliott and Philby takes place. Cary uses their long, elliptical conversation as a central structuring device for the show, which moves swiftly and without any identification between countries, eras and story lines. “That allowed me to tip my hat to the le Carré ‘Tinker, Tailor’ genre,” Cary said.Anchoring the rapidly shifting scenes are conversations: between Philby and Elliott, between Thomas and Elliot, and between Philby and his Russian debriefer. And between these, there are subplots: a fictional one involving a C.I.A. plot in Moscow after Philby’s defection, a true one about the identification of Anthony Blunt, the curator of Queen Elizabeth II’s art collection, as another member of the Cambridge group.“A key decision a director must make is the relationship between your camera and the story,” said Murphy, the show’s director, discussing the story’s shifts in time and location. In the show, “the camera reacts to everything, it doesn’t anticipate, which allows the audience to discover everything as the characters do.”Murphy’s London is a gray, monochrome place, full of brown-suited men and women who are constantly lighting cigarettes in dim rooms. “The era is often delivered cinematically as a tribute to the swinging ’60s,” Murphy said. “But the ’60s hadn’t swung yet; it was an England and a Europe trying to get off its knees after the war.”The Moscow that Philby escapes to is an even more drab city of slushy snow, long lines and drunks on the street. And although he is nominally welcomed as a hero, the K.G.B. is deeply suspicious that he has come to Moscow to spy for Britain.Pearce said that Philby mostly remained an enigma to him, too: “Did he really want to go to Moscow, or take the offer that Elliott makes of a peaceful life in the country in return for a full confession? Would his ego have allowed him to become an ordinary person in England?”While Philby’s flight to Moscow, and whether Elliott was complicit in it, remain an important ambiguity, the central question of the show, Cary said, is “whether there was sincerity in the depths of that friendship, even as there was duplicity in the great arc of the friendship.”That is also the essential question for Elliott, played by Lewis with a fine-tuned opacity that occasionally cracks to reveal the pain beneath.Lewis and the show’s writer Alex Cary also worked together on “Homeland,” and Lewis helped develop the script and approach for “A Spy Among Friends.”Sony Pictures Television“It is like a love story,” Lewis said. “He feels like the cuckold who gave everything blindly to the relationship without knowing he has been cheated on.”Midway through the first episode of the series, Murphy recreates the televised news conference that Philby gave after he was accused of being the “third man” in a Communist spy ring that included his fellow Cambridge student Guy Burgess. Asked whether he still regarded Burgess as a friend, Philby hesitates, then gives an answer that is perhaps the one sincere sentiment he expresses in the show:“On the subject of friendship,” he says slowly, “I’d prefer to say as little as possible, because it’s very complicated.” More