Once upon a time, television told stories about intelligent machines that take over the world and algorithms that prevent people from making their own choices, and it felt like distant, fanciful science fiction. This year, as actors and writers remained on strike for half of it-in part over the threat AI poses to human artistry and the opaque algorithm that dictates which streaming shows get placed in front of which eyeballs-this same kind of storytelling felt more present than future tense. And there was a fair amount of it in 2023: some made by streaming platforms most likely to succumb to the machines, others developed through traditional cable platforms most likely to rage against them. If there's anything we can take away from our season of list-making, it's that a technological anxiety loomed over our picks for the best television of 2023. And that after years of optimism or, at the least, openness to a sparkling new future of streaming TV, the best of the best demonstrate that the past is not totally behind us.
KATHRYN VANARENDONK: TV in 2023 was all about the algorithm, a natural next step for a medium with a long history of making shows about itself. We used to have The Dick Van Dyke Show and Murphy Brown and 30 Rock; now, we have an episode of Netflix's Black Mirror where the premise is that Netflix uses AI to scrape the lives of its viewers, turns that data into barely fictionalized Netflix shows, then algorithmically serves the shows back to those viewers like a form of content-based Soylent Green.
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