A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

Perfection is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and in most cases impossible to reach anyway. But as 2023 reaches its midpoint, there are already TV performances that, for us, reach the absolute pinnacle—perfect for their shows, their actors, and for the viewers lucky enough to witness it all come together. From Shakespeare-worthy tragedy to reality TV hosts going above and beyond, these are the eight television performances that will be sticking with us for the rest of 2023 and well beyond.

Liza Colón-Zayas, The Bear

A show often recognized for its bombast and tumult, it’s in the small moments that Liza Colón-Zayas’s performance as Tina, The Bear’s line cook turned sous-chef, hits you. In season one, she was resistant to the barrage of changes to the Original Beef of Chicagoland imposed by Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, whom she not so affectionately called “Jeff.” But in the second season, Tina relishes the growth she’s experienced because of those same shifts. It’s in the slow smile that envelops Tina’s face when Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) offers a promotion. The sideways hug Tina clings to with the news she’s headed to culinary school. The time Tina notes Carmy and Sydney’s “I’m sorry” sign traded back and forth in the kitchen, one she wordlessly returns in a moment of high heat. It’s even in the little “-rey” she adds to the end of Jeff as the season progresses—her own nod of respect. And all of those minuscule moments make possible Colón-Zayas’s powerhouse episode-five karaoke rendition of “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” which won’t leave a dry eye. All of it matters, just as every second counts. —Savannah Walsh

Kieran Culkin, Succession

While it’s nearly impossible to single out just one performance in Succession’s stacked ensemble, Kieran Culkin hit not one false note as the wisecracking, pregrieving Roman Roy. By series’ end, Culkin surprisingly emerged as the bleeding heart of the series, taking the audience on Roman’s emotional roller coaster that required more from Culkin than the three prior seasons combined. Look no further than the penultimate episode of the series, “Church and State,” for the apex (or nadir) of this ride. Roman breaks down while attempting to eulogize his late father, shedding the bluster and bravado we’d grown accustomed to, and publicly falling to pieces. Culkin told Vanity Fair that he opted not to overthink that seminal scene before shooting. “Stuff like that is hard to keep reliving,” he said. “A lot of stuff happens on the show that is not planned or rehearsed or talked about [beforehand]. When it happens, it’s really lovely and hard to recreate.” Roman goes king-making installer of a fascist president to a blubbering mess in Jeremy Strong’s arms, with Culkin nailing every twist and turn along the way. There’s a reason Culkin is choosing to run in the lead-actor category instead of the supporting category at this year’s Emmys—he was the standout of the season. —Chris Murphy

Alan Cumming, The Traitors

“It’s the campest thing I’ve ever done,” Alan Cumming has said of his gig hosting Peacock’s reality series The Traitors—and for a man who participated in Romy and Michele’s original “Time After Time” dance, that’s really saying something. The hosting job for this elimination reality show is, on paper, simple, but Cumming bites into every single moment, swooping in with an elaborate cape to announce the day’s challenge at “his” Scottish castle, or skulking around the elimination roundtable to determine which of the 20 contestants are, in fact, “trrrrraitors.” The Scottish brogue has never been so sinister and alluring, the tartan never so chic. “Although I’m hosting a reality show, I feel like I’m definitely acting a character,” Cumming has said of his role. Everyone on reality TV is performing a character at this point, of course, but rarely has it seemed so deliciously, archly perfect. —Katey Rich

Dominique Fishback, Swarm

Dominique Fishback’s impressive list of credits—rich supporting roles in David Simon projects Show Me a Hero and The Deuce, Oscar buzz for her work in Judas and the Black Messiah—couldn’t have prepared audiences for what she pulls off in Swarm. Portraying Dre, an obsessive follower of a Beyoncé-like pop star, the star careens between heartbreaking and terrifying, slapstick and grounded, as the character evolves into a near-mythic serial killer. She finds notes of authenticity in each wild turn the Donald Glover–produced limited series takes, bringing texture and nuance to the demanding and somewhat surrealist part. She’s also just eminently, thrillingly watchable—hearkening back to the antiheroic tour de forces she modeled her performance on, like Charlize Theron’s Monster. “As a Black actress…you end up being responsible for so many things. I just really didn’t want that responsibility,” she told Vanity Fair earlier this month. “I wanted to make art.” —David Canfield

Sarah Goldberg, Barry

There are no one-dimensional characters on Alec Berg and Bill Hader’s Barry, and Sally Reed—a wannabe Hollywood success story who comes from an abusive background only to end up raising a child with a serial killer—is one of the more complicated. Thanks to actor Sarah Goldberg, Sally’s mania, her pulsating want and ambition, her trauma, her nuance can be the saddest thing in the world and the absolute funniest. It’s a tightrope walked by another standout performance this year, Matthew Macfadden’s excellent Tom Wambsgans of Succession, which is on purpose, Goldberg recently told Vanity Fair. “That’s my favorite character on TV!” she said. “It’s a stretch, but where they overlap is the victim who becomes the bully. And so I definitely tried to rob him.” The flip-flop between victim and aggressor is the Sally Reed experience, and in the show’s final season, her backstory and her character’s wonky layers come to fore. It’s a thrill to watch such a singular character in such capable hands. —Kenzie Bryant

James Marsden, Jury Duty

We’ve seen James Marsden play the coiffed handsome dude, from The Notebook to Hairspray, a myriad of times, but his role as an obnoxious, heightened “actor prick” version of himself in Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty saw the actor at his best. Marsden is lovably insufferable as an alternate juror, whose interactions with Ronald Gladden—the only individual on the show who wasn’t an actor—became an instant fan favorite on TikTok. It’s clear Marsden had been waiting for a role like this one: “I was always itching to do that kind of comedy,” he told VF in conversation with his Party Down costar Lizzy Caplan. “It was the most Method I’ve ever been. But it was the most absurdly Method character to do it with. But also just tremendously fun. I wish I could say that it wasn’t so fun, but I was having a blast playing someone who was just so unsavory.” The result is some of the most playful and clever work I’ve had the pleasure of watching all year. Whether he was calling the paparazzi to get himself out of jury duty or helping Jeannie (Edy Modica) and Noah (Mekki Leeper) get it on in the bedroom, Jury Duty proves that Marsden soars when he’s at his silliest. —Burake Teshome

Diane Morgan, Cunk on Earth

The confident idiot is a classic comic trope, stretching back to the time of Aristophanes and Aristophanelbows. This is the sort of thing I’d expect to hear from Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk, a pompous moron whose eponymous series Cunk on Earth is like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation hosted by a posh Ali G. As Cunk, Morgan delivers even the most breathtakingly stupid punch lines with deadpan aplomb, whether she’s examining some of the oldest paintings on the planet (“I’m entering a cave, not by mistake or because I’m a wolf, but because I’ve been specifically asked to come here by the producers, to look at cave art”) or earnestly asking a historian if the ancient Romans invented or merely perfected anal bleaching. Brits, apparently, have been in on the joke for a decade; Morgan started playing Cunk on a BBC series in 2013. With Cunk on Earth’s Netflix release, Americans can finally join in on the fun—a performance nearly as flawless as the 1989 techno anthem “Pump Up the Jam.” —Hillary Busis

Steven Yeun, Beef 

Steven Yeun has played a quick-witted union organizer in Sorry to Bother You, a traumatized carnival barker in Nope, and a Korean immigrant hoping for the American dream in Minari. Each time, Yeun delivers intelligent, multilayered explorations of his characters—but what the Oscar-nominated actor was able to do in the Netflix road rage series Beef expands even further beyond all of that. Perhaps it’s because this story was so personal to him. Yeun and the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, who are good friends in real life, pulled from their own experiences growing up in the Midwest and in the Korean church for the story of Danny, a struggling contractor whose road rage incident with a wealthy woman (Ali Wong) leads him down a path of destruction. In one of the series’ most powerful moments, Yeun’s Danny has a breakdown during a worship session, exposing all of his vulnerability for the first time. “You look at your old friends or your family that you’ve kind of left in judgment, and there’s also that feeling of tender, warm love that you have for them too, in their broken humanity,” Yeun told Vanity Fair. “We were just kind of mining from all aspects of people we know, parts of ourselves.” Over 10 episodes, Yeun is at times charming, terrifying, unpredictable, and vindictive, but there’s always hope that Danny might find his way. Yeun navigates it all with ease. —Rebecca Ford