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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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      Yes, These Gays Are Trying to Murder You

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      Queer villains are all over our screens these days. What do they have to say?IT BECAME A meme the second the words came out of Jennifer Coolidge’s mouth. Trapped on a yacht with a small group of ornately charming men who’ve lured her into their world with calculated flattery, she now realizes they have no intention of letting her ever return to the luxury resort where they found her. In the final minutes of the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” Coolidge’s rich, lonely, addled Tanya McQuoid pleads her case to the boat’s captain. “Please! These gays,” she implores in her signature husky bleat. “They’re trying to murder me!”Listen to This ArticleThat moment — the line that launched a thousand GIFs, not to mention T-shirts, coffee mugs and emblazoned hand fans — was brilliantly designed for the decontextualization it quickly underwent. But it also marked a milestone in the history of gay representation in film and television because … it was true: Those gays were trying to murder her! What better way to obtain her fortune and secure their status as haute Mediterranean palazzo dwellers? Although poor Tanya isn’t long for this world, she does manage to take down most of them before exiting, like the trained hit woman she isn’t. And the gay men in the show’s audience? We were the first ones cheering.Why was this OK? (And yes, weirdly, it was OK.) It helped to know that a queer man, the show’s creator, Mike White, had originated the idea. If you’re gay, chances are you understood that you were on safe ground with the show — that this wasn’t homophobia but, rather, a joyous reclamation of the idea of gay monstrosity from the homophobes who held custody of it for decades.The scene also upended the conviction that negative stereotypes can be assiduously monitored and tallied to determine whether a film or drama or sitcom or line or joke is with us or against us. For many L.G.B.T.Q. consumers of culture, including me, that kind of tensed, hyperwary watching — “Is this good for the gays or bad for the gays?” — is a hard habit to break. Several generations of us grew up exposed to movies and TV shows that forced us to develop a bitter awareness that, at any minute, we could be confronted with an ugly caricature or made the target of a cruel slur deployed to generate laughs or cheers from a straight audience. Several younger generations of gay men were raised in an era when the industry regularly patted itself on the back for earnest “representation” designed to show straight viewers that gay people were “just like us,” though only rarely were gay characters allowed to be just like themselves. And still younger generations have come of age in a world in which gay creators have increasingly taken charge of the way queer characters are depicted. But a murderous cabal of gays? Not since Sgt. “Pepper” Anderson broke up a trio of kill-crazy lesbians who ran a nursing home in an early ’70s episode of the Angie Dickinson cop show “Police Woman” had television gone there, and even 50 years ago, that story line was viewed as sufficiently retrograde to warrant a rebuke from critics and gay activists alike.What “The White Lotus” did felt so backward that it was, paradoxically, transgressive — not to mention very gay. This punchline was so air quotes appalling that gay viewers could enjoy it without having to fret that straight viewers might get the wrong idea about us. (And if they did decide that gay people were lethal Eurotrash yacht queens? Better, I suppose, to be feared than hated.) In any case, “These gays …” was primarily about ownership. It wasn’t “We can take a joke”; it was “We can make a joke.”The 20th-century Manhattan writer Truman Capote (above, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the 2005 biopic) will be the focus of a Hulu series starring Tom Hollander.ShutterstockWHAT WASN’T APPARENT when the show aired is that those killer gays presaged a trend: We’re witnessing an explosion of out-and-proud gay villainy. Showtime’s forthcoming limited series “Fellow Travelers,” created by the gay writer Ron Nyswaner, whose credits stretch back to “Philadelphia” (1993), is a kind of idiosyncratic dramatized history of gay-movement politics from the McCarthy years through the early days of the AIDS crisis. Its protagonist, played by the gay actor Matt Bomer, is not a heroic activist or a noble victim but a ruthless, chilly, opportunistic user, an ambitious closeted husband, father and eventually grandfather who, in an early episode, manipulates the timid male lover he dominates into writing an anonymous letter that could destroy the life of a lesbian friend. The character is complex, but nobody would call him a good guy.Showtime recently canceled plans to air another limited series that is literally about a gay man who’s trying to murder people, but Netflix picked it up, and eight episodes of “Ripley,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” starring Andrew Scott as the obsessive killer, will likely be released next year. Readers first met Ripley in 1955, when Highsmith introduced him as a young American of indeterminate desires whose envy of the rich, indolent playboy he’s been hired to bring home from Italy shades into a kind of lethal longing — to be him, have him, replace him. Ripley’s sexuality is murky in Highsmith’s five novels, and in the hands of her many adapters, he’s been as heterosexual as when Dennis Hopper plays him in Wim Wenders’s “The American Friend” (1977) or as gay as when Matt Damon portrays him in Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999). And this time? We don’t know yet, but Scott has already described him as “a queer character.”A third limited series, “Capote’s Women,” a continuation of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology for FX and Hulu, will feature Tom Hollander — one of the murderous gays from “The White Lotus” — as Truman Capote. (Full disclosure: I am working with Murphy on an unrelated film project.) The Capote drama will apparently concentrate on the latter period of the writer’s life, in which Esquire’s publication of excerpts from his novel “Answered Prayers” (1987) was viewed as a friendship-rupturing betrayal by the society women whose company the author craved. Although it hasn’t been revealed which version or versions of Capote the show will bring forth, a degree of villainy is baked in, since Capote himself, on one talk show appearance after another, cultivated an image as a demonic, acid-tongued imp. It’s the Bad Gay renaissance we never asked for but somehow seem to have long wanted.To be specific, this is gay male villainy — lesbians and bisexuals, long underrepresented in a world of pop culture still dominated by male creators, are insufficiently ubiquitous in movies and TV to be reframed as fun bad guys. (A delightful recent exception: the homicidal lesbian elders played by Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson in Rian Johnson’s “Poker Face.”) And trans villainy is, right now, not an option in pop culture: The struggle for acceptance remains too imperiled for anyone to be glib or ironic about goals like positive representation. White gay men make better marks; as members of two dominant cultures, we’re easy targets in a world in which everyone’s hyperconscious of identity, and we have enough clout to be labeled part of the problem without that critique being racist or sexist.Last year, Hollander ushered in the latest Bad Gay renaissance when his character, Quentin, conspires to kill Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge, on the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”Courtesy of HBOThat itself is an indication of how far we’ve journeyed from, say, 1981, when the gay culture writer and activist Vito Russo published “The Celluloid Closet,” a book that traces Hollywood’s contempt for and mistreatment of gay characters from the earliest days of cinema. Russo explored a subject that had previously been viewed by moviegoers simply as the way things were — the treatment of gay people as pansies and wimps, perverts and tragedies, serial killers and suicides. He wrote the first edition of his book roughly a decade after the Stonewall uprising — during which, while television slowly but steadily humanized gay characters, giving them dignified guest appearances in ongoing comedies and dramas as well as the occasional TV movie, feature films continued to traffic in mincing best friends, bar-crawling lowlifes, killers and victims. The James Bond films, those bastions of heterosexual virility, toyed with a pair of gay hit men in 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever” and, in general, big-screen queer sexuality was often murder adjacent (“Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “American Gigolo,” “Cruising,” “Dressed to Kill”) when it wasn’t comical, absurd or doomed.But what neither Russo nor his readers could have known was that AIDS was about to change the world. For the next 15 years, after the virus became prevalent, gay characters gradually became exemplary — the only choice during a struggle in which Hollywood felt compelled to represent the part of American society that didn’t want gay men demonized, marginalized or dead. This period, bracketed roughly by “Victor/Victoria” (1982) and “In & Out” (1997), wasn’t free of queer villains, but they were often greeted with ire and contempt: When the serial killer Buffalo Bill was showcased in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), backlash was so intense that its director, Jonathan Demme, turned around and made “Philadelphia,” about an admirable, likable gay lawyer seriously ill with AIDS. To say that many of these films were made with persuasion in mind is not to disparage them. Anti-gay agitprop had been a staple of Hollywood for decades; what was pro-gay agitprop but a long-overdue attempt to fight fire with fire?By the late ’90s, Good Gays had become staples of both movies and TV series — 1998 marked the beginning of “Will and Grace” — and, not soon after that, it finally became acceptable for a new kind of Bad Gay to stand up and be counted. Twenty-three summers ago, a group of strangers went to Borneo and had their adventures filmed for 39 days and, when it was over, one of them was a millionaire. Richard Hatch, then 39, was the first gay villain of the reality TV era, and a shock at a time when L.G.B.T.Q. television presences were supposed to model relatability and safeness. On the night of the first-season finale of “Survivor,” more than 51 million Americans watched as one competitor Hatch had beaten offered a disgusted endorsement, labeling him a snake and his rival a rat, then telling her fellow jurors that they should honor what nature intended and vote “for the snake to eat the rat.”It’s hard now to convey what a violation of accepted norms it was for a straight woman to use that language about a gay man on national television, especially since, in retrospect, Hatch’s malevolence was wildly overstated. All he was guilty of was figuring out how to work the game before everyone else did. What Hatch was doing — observing a playing field as only a lifelong outsider could, then using the ruthless detachment that exclusion can generate to his advantage — was, to many gay viewers, a recognizable survival strategy now revealed on a nationwide scale. The cultural ascent of a Bad Gay was a shock: Hatch had the dubious honor of becoming the first homosexual man America could hiss at when the country was only just past the most acute phase of the AIDS pandemic and beginning to uncouple male homosexuality from death. For gay people, the question was complex: Should we hate him, root for him or both?IF YOU’RE GAY and over 30, you’re probably at least somewhat used to assessing negative reflections of yourself on a spectrum that stretches from the flatly unacceptable to the semi-embraceable. At the most extreme end, for instance, there is the slur that gay people are groomers, a charge closely tied to the idea that homosexuality is a spreadable disease. Because social conservatives have always found the accusation of preying on children an irresistible way to threaten sexual minorities, it should not be surprising that in the last couple of years, the groomer libel has been transferred from gay men to drag queens and trans people.But history provides no shortage of other gay villain clichés from which to choose. There’s the trope that gay people — or gay-coded characters — are weak, cowardly, sniveling (think of Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith on the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space” whimpering, “Oh, the pain, the pain!”). That one’s almost more boring than it is defamatory — but it’s still defamatory, even when drolly done. There’s also the old, double-edged McCarthy-era insult, intriguingly played with in “Fellow Travelers,” that gay people are security risks on two fronts: They harbor a secret that makes them susceptible to blackmail, and their resentment toward the oppressive straight world makes them obvious candidates for double agentry; in other words, we’re potential victims and potential moles. Then there’s the having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too stereotype that gay people are fine but gay closet cases are all potential serial killers. Finally, there’s the broad-brush (and essentially misogynistic) derogation of gay men as effeminate, an old insult that has been so effectively reclaimed by happily effeminate gay men that it’s lost much of its sting. As Harvey Fierstein subversively states in the 1995 documentary version of “The Celluloid Closet,” “I like the sissy,” and that stereotype, the movie origins of which can be traced back to the silent era, can range from hurtful and belittling to joyful and empowering, depending on who’s doing the sashaying and shantaying, and to what end it’s being used.In “Fellow Travelers,” soon to be on Showtime, Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a federal official with a vengeful streak.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeThere’s one kind of gay villain, though, that seems especially alluring these days, including to gay men. It’s the Wicked Queen — the devious, manipulative, cunning, conniving male homosexual who has learned how to stay two steps ahead of anyone who thinks they can outsmart him. The Wicked Queen often shows up in stories that take place in a primarily gay universe: He’s the selfish one, the callous one, the one who’s a bitch to all his friends — his malice doesn’t need to be filtered through the gaze of the straight world. It’s our business, and it’s there for our delectation. At his most refined and extreme, the Wicked Queen seems not only to relish his criminality but to turn it into a louchely decadent performance piece. These are the gay villains who are currently having their moment in the spotlight. Performative, even showy gay (or gay-coded) villainy — the idea that we’re dark-souled masterminds who know how to be stylish and sociopathic in a single gesture — has been around forever; it’s evident in everything from George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt (technically straight but really not) in “All About Eve” (1950) to Cesar Romero’s Joker in the 1960s “Batman” TV series to Dr. Evil’s pinkie raised to his pursed lips in the “Austin Powers” movies to Divine’s early 1970s collaborations with John Waters to the latest seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Yes, it’s a vicious attack on our collective character but, honestly, as vicious attacks go, some of us kind of enjoy that one.Perhaps, on occasion, we even wear it proudly. The murderous gays in “The White Lotus” certainly do; they escort Tanya to an opera not long before they intend to kill her, almost as if they were event planners pulling together a theme weekend, and to win her confidence, they actually pretend to be a different gay cliché — the obsequious Gay Best Friends, forever fluttering around and consoling the heroine, happy to serve as her supporting characters. Using one stereotype to conceal a worse one? That’s so ruthless, it’s applause-worthy; it’s what one of the drag house members in Jennie Livingston’s documentary “Paris Is Burning” (1990) means when he explains, “Boys are the stupidest. They don’t know how to do a stunt right. Now, faggots will do a stunt and, I mean, you will never catch up with it until years later!” Translation: Gay people know how to play the long game because we have to know; we’re tough, we’re smart and we’re sly because that’s how we endure.It’s worth noting that the appealing Bad Gay is, and should remain, the province of fiction. In real life, if you internalize those personality characteristics too thoroughly, you do not become a fascinating charismatic antihero; you just become George Santos. But in pop culture, there’s something unexpectedly liberating, even progressive, about seeing gay characters unshackled from the necessity of making a good impression. (It’s why John Early’s staggeringly self-absorbed, needy gay millennial in the cult comedy series “Search Party” [2016-22] was so beloved by gay viewers.) In its first two seasons, the comedy series “The Other Two,” a savage and specific take on our boundless appetite for fame, presents one of its main characters, the aspiring actor Cary Dubek (played by Drew Tarver), as an essentially Good Gay, a young, appealing guy who came out on the late side and is now simultaneously learning to navigate the dating world and the thousand natural shocks and humiliations of struggling on the margins of show business.But in the recently concluded third and final season, Cary finally makes it, if not to the top then to the middle, and goes full Bad Gay. He becomes a camera-hungry, friend-shafting, insincere, self-dramatizing narcissist. In the hands of the show’s co-creators, the former “Saturday Night Live” head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, it feels clear that Cary doesn’t lose himself so much as find himself — the monster he has been all along was just waiting for a chance to emerge. It pains me to say it, but this is, in a way, what diversity looks like (at least, this is one of the things diversity looks like): the dead-on representation of a type that a lot of gay men have met in life but that rarely makes it onto a screen.It’s fair to ask whether we can afford this at a moment when those who hate and fear queer Americans are getting louder and bolder. But no minority culture has ever thrived by retreating to role model politesse in response to the menacing behavior of those who are never going to approve of them anyway. Besides, there’s something undeniably satisfying in saying to homophobes, “You think drag queens reading fairy tales to children is scary? We’ll show you scary.”It’s also a welcome change from a time in which every single movie or television show that was good for the cause had to be greeted with a dutiful round of applause or show of support, no matter its faults. Almost 40 years ago, in his 1987 revised edition of “The Celluloid Closet,” Russo wrote, “There is a tendency on the part of politically committed lesbians and gay men to make allowances for the aesthetic shortcomings of films that offer a more accurate picture of gay life than has been previously seen. This is the temporary cultural reaction of people grateful for a refreshing change in the way their lives are reflected on the screen. This will also moderate with time.” Russo was right, but I wonder how he’d react to the fact that gay culture has virtually inverted itself. Rather than make apologies for stories with good intentions and dubious entertainment value, we now get to see ourselves as worse people in better product. It seems odd that the fragile, perhaps precarious luxury of being able to enjoy an entertaining range of gay villains is a signpost of progress. But a qualified win is still a win, and this victory can, perhaps, be counted as one of the strange spoils of a larger, long-fought battle: the chance to be ourselves — all of ourselves — even when we’re monsters. More

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      In ‘The Other Two,’ Drew Tarver and Heléne Yorke Are Almost Famous

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      What’s it like to be fame-adjacent? The premise of this dark HBO Max comedy was in some ways familiar territory for its two stars. That may not last.Drew Tarver’s room at the Bowery Hotel was bright. It was comfortable. It overlooked a cemetery, but not in a creepy way. When Tarver arrived, jet-lagged and rain-soaked after a late flight from Los Angeles, he found a Bowery-branded teddy bear on the bed and a bottle of red wine on the cafe table, compliments of the manager.The next morning, the actress Heléne Yorke, 36, took the elevator to his room. As Tarver hid his retainer case, Yorke read the manager’s note, which addressed him as Mr. Tarver. “Who do they think you are?” Yorke teased.Tarver, 35, is a star of the dark comedy “The Other Two,” which began its life on Comedy Central but returns for Season 2 on HBO Max, starting Thursday. He plays Cary Dubek, a gay aspiring actor. Yorke plays his sister, Brooke, a former dancer. Harassed by survival jobs, man troubles and housing crises, they lead lives of loud desperation until their much younger brother, Chase (Case Walker), becomes a tween sensation — or, as one newscaster puts it, “the next big white kid.”During the first season, Brooke and Cary ride Chase’s designer coattails, clumsily. In the second, each has achieved some success. Drew now presents a red carpet segment called “Age Net Worth Feet.” Brooke manages Chase and their mother, Pat (Molly Shannon), who has become a talk-show host.In some ways, this limited celebrity parallels Tarver’s and Yorke’s own lives. After years of appearing in niche fare, they are finally fame-adjacent. “We’re still not famous,” Yorke said. She looked out of Tarver’s window. The rooms next to his, she noticed, were nicer. They had little balconies.“Turns out my bottle of wine isn’t so great after all,” Tarver said.“Being in your late 20s, early 30s, watching other people surpass you, it’s really disorienting,” Yorke said. “It gives you this hunger and this thirst that is all-encompassing.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEven as “The Other Two,” created by the former “Saturday Night Live” writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, is a rapier-sharp satire of the entertainment industry, it also presents an unusually warm and functional relationship between Cary and Brooke, undergirded by a real affection that the actors seem to share. (Or maybe they’re just very good actors?)During an hourlong conversation in the lobby (Henri, the failed hurricane, had scotched a planned mini-golf outing), the two discussed the show, their poor pandemic choices and their hopes for their characters. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Who was cast first?YORKE Drew was cast before me. In true sexist fashion. Drew is also No. 1 on the call sheet, two years running, which is devastating for me as a woman.TARVER I have constantly said we need to make her No. 1. No one listens to me.YORKE Drew knew Chris from the improv and sketch comedy scene. I was not a part of that world at all. I got called back to read with Drew. They were like, “Feel free to do a little improv.” And I was sweating through my clothes.TARVER In her audition, it just felt like siblings.YORKE In showbiz, if you’re a duo, it’s not always roses. But it genuinely is for us. We just have fun all day.But who’s the better actor?TARVER HeléneYORKE [Simultaneously:] Drew. Everything Drew does is so true. This is a person who is very funny and very off the cuff but also has a deep connection to what’s important. [To Tarver:] Now is when you talk about me.TARVER She just comes in and kills it.Yorke and Tarver in a scene from Season 2, in which their characters have begun to achieve some measure of success. Greg Endries/Hbo MaxSo you always related to these characters? You never saw them as monsters?YORKE I saw myself in them. Being in your late 20s, early 30s, watching other people surpass you, it’s really disorienting. It gives you this hunger and this thirst that is all-encompassing. That’s what happens to Brooke and Cary. That’s what you watch them go through. I remember riding the subway and looking at people on commutes to real jobs, being like, they have health insurance and a full collection of pots and pans. That was so beyond me.TARVER You were riding the subway with just that one egg pan.YORKE It was all I had to make breakfast! But I have a lot of sympathy for Brooke and Cary. Anything they do that is bad or crazy is out of that hunger.In the second season, they’re tasting success. Does it change them?TARVER It’s surprising how little it does for them. They’re realizing, like: “Oh, I would have killed for this last year. But now I have it. Why didn’t that fix me? Why am I already used to it?”YORKE It’s devastating to realize that you are still who you are. Success is not a magic wand. You think, “Oh, I’ll get success and all of a sudden, I’ll be this better person who’s happier and more settled in my life.” You get it, and all of your [expletive] comes with you.TARVER The third season is just them real-time in therapy.YORKE It’s “In Treatment.”You had begun the second season when the shutdown hit. How did you spend the year off?YORKE I became a five-star chef. And I started writing. I was saying yes to new experiences. I was like, I’m going to try skiing. I learned how to ski on YouTube, and I tore my ACL two weeks before going back to this job. So, yeah: cooking and being stupid.And what were your injuries, Drew?TARVER I lost both my feet. No. My two sisters live in L.A. We all packed up and went back to Georgia. I also got on YouTube. My grandma had this old Airstream trailer, all grown over with weeds, with raccoons living in it. Me and my little brother started watching YouTube videos where people get Airstreams and restore them. It’s always like, “Hey, I’m Mike.” “And I’m Diane. And we bought an Airstream.” Then the next video is like, “We’re cleaning out the Airstream, we’re throwing everything away.” The third video is like, “We’re done with this and we’re getting a divorce.”YORKE He grew his hair out so long and a full Georgia trash beard. There are pictures, a time-lapse of him shaving it into mutton chops.TARVER I shaved it a day before we started filming. It was shocking seeing my mouth again. I wasn’t convinced it worked right. The first morning I came in, I was like: “Hey, real quick, before we get out there, does this look like me? Am I my smiling right?”YORKE We came back in real rough shape.But you won. You made it onto a show that people actually watch. Are there downsides?TARVER Sometimes it feels a little scarier. When you’re coming up, you’re just fearless with your choices because you’re just like, yes, anything. Then when you have a job, you have something to lose. Fear sets in.YORKE This thing that never goes away — and it’s so sick — is that every good thing will be the last thing. So if it comes to an end, nobody will ask me to do anything.It must be nice having a low-key kind of fame, though. People recognize you, but you don’t have to flee the paparazzi.TARVER I mean, I do that. Even if it’s just one person, I will push them over and flee.If this show has more seasons, what do you want for these characters?YORKE I hope that the situations become even fancier.TARVER I want to see them continue to struggle. But in palaces.YORKE It’s so easy to say you want them to figure it out. But I don’t want them to because I’m comforted by the fact that they don’t. It makes me feel less alone.TARVER It does feel nice to come to work and play a bumbling person. Because it’s like, OK, yeah, this feels real.YORKE We want them to always feel lost and bad. That’s what’s universal. More

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      Watch This Fun Australian Drama and a Dark HBO Max Comedy

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      If you like juicy gossip or watching suburban parties implode onscreen, our TV critic has some shows for you.This is a preview of the Watching newsletter, which is now reserved for Times subscribers. Sign up to get it in your inbox four times a week.Dear Watchers,“Succession” will be back in October. Finally!Have a beautiful week.I like when parties in the suburbs take a turn.Miranda Otto in a scene from “The Unusual Suspects.”Hulu‘The Unusual Suspects’When to watch: Now, on Hulu.The meaner fancy-schmancy characters are to their nannies, the more we root for their comeuppance, and there’s plenty of that in this light Australian drama. Sara (Miranda Otto) treats Evie (Aina Dumlao) shabbily, but everything goes topsy-turvy once they become enmeshed in a jewelry heist of sorts. While this show covers some of the same “rich people handle parenting like this” territory as “Big Little Lies” or even “The Slap” do, “Unusual” has a lot more fun. Its serious moments, particularly around Evie’s ache for the young daughter she sends money to in the Philippines, have a full sense of place and purpose, but the overall tone is more mimosa than whiskey.It is also only four episodes, and while I could have indulged in more of the real estate pornography, it’s thrilling to see a show like this actually keep things brief. If you spend a lot of time thinking about Shiv’s clothes on “Succession,” watch this.If you don’t have anything nice to say … come sit by me.Drew Tarver and Heléne Yorke in a scene from the new season of “The Other Two.”Zach Dilgard/HBO‘The Other Two’When to watch: Now, on HBO Max. The first two episodes of Season 2 arrive Thursday.This acerbic comedy returns for its second season more than two years after the end of its first, and it seems “The Other Two” used this time to sharpen its claws. In Season 1, Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and Cary (Drew Tarver) were total outsiders to their little brother’s pop-star success; this season, they’re seemingly further along in their own goals but are still not finding what they’re looking for. The jokes are even cattier, and more wonderful, though sometimes that festive gossipiness bumps up against the show’s secret, tiny earnest streak.The biggest issue this season is that Cary’s story is a light-year more interesting than Brooke’s. His tortured self-loathing provides a much richer plotline than her lust for fame adjacency, though both arcs lead to plenty of good material. The show is its best, though, when the two characters are together, using their embittered shorthand but also (shhh) genuinely supporting each other. Absolutely start with Season 1 to get the lay of the land; two episodes of Season 2 debut each Thursday for the next five weeks.Also this week:Adam Kingman competes on the season finale of “Making It.”Evans Vestal Ward/NBCThe 10th season of “American Horror Story” premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX.“Archer” returns for its 12th season Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FXX.The season finales of “The Good Fight” and “iCarly” arrive Thursday, on Paramount+.The season finale of “Making It” airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on NBC. More