It wasn’t a regular year, this 2023. Writers were on strike; actors were on strike. “Succession” lurched into the grave. Martha the Medicare Lady was making people crazier than they already were. And you know what? Shingles doesn’t care.

That said, I had assumed that this retrospective examination and contemplation of TV in the year ’23 was destined to be about the new. The novel. The innovative. Which is counterintuitive, to be sure: Television is a medium—or an industry, or whatever it is—that seems passionately dedicated to the idea that viewers don’t want to feel too passionately about anything, or have their equilibrium disturbed or their worldview assaulted. Hence the flourishing business of game shows, “unscripted” celebrity-reality series and nonfiction programming about serial murderers, which are always comforting to those of us not being murdered.