My top 5 TV shows of 2023

Obligatory preamble

As seems to be traditional by now, the caveats to all of this are:

• For the purpose of this list, a show counts as a 2023 show if the majority of a season was released in the UK this calendar year.
• I’m just a guy watching shows while eating dinner after work, not a professional critic. Hence, there are heaps of stuff that people rave about I’ve not seen.
• I am writing from my own perspective with my own taste. Hence because I can’t bear second-hand embarrassment, I haven’t managed to watch a full episode of Succession even though I’m sure everyone who says it’s amazing is right.
• I know it’s traditional to put out these kind of lists in December or the first week of January, but you know better late than never.

5. Ahsoka

It hasn’t been the best year for franchise shows on Disney+. Even the previously great Mandalorian had a deeply inconsistent third season and Secret Invasion was almost certainly the worst thing I saw in 2023. In the context, it was a relief to see Ahsoka not only doing something new with Star Wars, but doing it so satisfyingly.

At some level Star Wars has always been more of a fantasy fable in space than sci-fi. However, Ahsoka is the most fully the franchise has ever embraced this side of itself. Not only does the plot focus in on the most mystical parts of franchise’s lore, but the tone is almost Arthurian.

This wasn’t to everyone’s liking. The show’s supposedly slow pacing drew a fair amount of criticism. For me, though, that not only spoke to the character work being given space to breath, but it also fitted with the choice of sub-genre. Our heroes have been forced to go on a long voyage that not only takes them far from the bustle of traditional Star Wars settings like Mos Eisley or Coruscant, but also creates the room for them to contemplate, to remember, to evolve. It’s not edgy, sophisticated and grounded like Andor. Nor is it pulpy and propulsive like the Mandalorian. It’s meditative and otherworldly. Whilst still delivering the lightsabre battles and dogfights you want from Star Wars.

I also rather liked some of the new, or at least new to me, characters Ahsoka introduced. David Tennant is great fun voicing the latest in Star Wars’ lineage of sassy, put upon droids. However, the most memorable entrants are the two force wielding mercenaries, played by Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno and the sadly departed Ray Stevenson. They initially seem to fit the familiar franchise archetype of “Jedi fallen to the dark side” but it rapidly becomes apparent that they are a new kind of antagonist. Stevenson is positively magnetic giving a performance so multifaceted that it completely subverts Star Wars’ typical Manicheanism.

Where I would pick up the show, and the reason it isn’t higher on this list, is that the ending is frustratingly open to the point that it feels more like a mid-season break than a proper finale. That said, this complaint is rather mollified by the news that there is a second season on the way, which will presumably pay off this build up.

4. The Last of Us

Given that this is perhaps the most disturbing show I’ve seen all year, there is something paradoxically reassuring about the Last of Us. The story is taken from the game every gamer seems to agree has the best story. It was made for the Waitrose of TV stations by the showrunner of the superlative (and tonally apposite) Chernobyl. And it centres around two of the most impressive TV actors to have broken out in recent years. So, you knew it was going to be good.

I particularly appreciated how defiantly episodic it was. Though it has the production values of a film, it is very definitely not a ‘six-hour movie’. Each episode or pair of episodes tells a distinct, complex and satisfying story in its own right. This not only makes the plot progression feel more purposive as you’re watching, but more distinct sections of it linger in the memory afterwards.

3. Poker Face

If the Last of Us was the most dread inducing show of 2023, then Poker Face is the most unalloyed fun. Writer-director Rian Johnson brings the wit and brio that infused his Knives Out films to this Columbo homage. It features Natasha Lyonne as a drifter with a preternatural ability to sense lies.

Even more than the Last of Us, Poker Face is defiantly episodic. There is an overarching plot but the focus of each episode is on Lyonne’s character arriving in a new place, meeting the characters who call it home and unravelling a fresh murder mystery.

The line up of guest stars across the season is frankly ridiculous: Adrian Brody, Benjamin Bratt, Hong Chau, Chloë Sevigny, Ron Pearlman, Nick Nolte, Tim Blake Nelson, Stephanie Hsu, Charles Melton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Merritt Weaver to name just some of them.

Moreover, the show makes an interesting companion to Knives Out and Glass Onion in that the films take place in ritzy surroundings like a country manor or a private island, whereas the show favours settings with more dirt under their fingernails: casinos, motels, a barbeque shack, a petrol station etc. Hence, while these stories are not satirical in the way Knives Out is, they do start painting a portrait of America seen from close quarters. Most importantly, like the films they manage to be engrossing, smart and funny at the same time.

2. Murder at the End of the World

It’s been a big couple of months for prestigious, thematically thrillers filmed in Iceland about women trying to solve murders in the Artic Circle. This one is basically a country house mystery set at a tech billionaire’s luxury doomsday bunker in the frozen wilderness.

I could tell you about how lovingly staged and well shot it is. I could tell you that it’s a moving portrait of a lost soul. I could tell you it has excellent performances from among others Emma Corrin, Clive Owen, and Harris Dickinson. I could tell you that it is the smartest depiction of AI I’ve yet seen in fiction and subtly weaves genuinely interesting insights about the power and pathologies of big tech into the story. I could note that, like Vigil, it finds a contemporary setting where it feels realistic for our sleuth to cut off from backup. However, what I absolutely need you to know is how engrossing it is.

I just sang the praises of the episodic nature of a number of a bunch of shows, but Murders shows why serialised storytelling can also be remarkably effective. It basically grabs you by the eyeballs and yanks you from scene to scene and episode to episode. The twists, the puzzles and the cliffhangers are so good that it’s not so much binge worthy as binge demanding.

1. The Bear, Season 2

While I am confident that the Bear is the best show I’ve seen this year, it’s paradoxically the hardest to enthuse about. It’s very hard to pinpoint why it work so well. But believe me it does.

Let me use some comparisons to underline what a success it is. In my humble opinion, it belongs in the pantheon of truly great TV alongside shows like the Wire. In fact, I’d say it’s comfortably better than many of the shows like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones that are presented as the towering achievements of Peak TV. It is nigh on impossible to pinpoint a bad scene, let alone a bad episode. There are no characters you want off the screen nor are there bad habits the people making it need to break. I really can’t muster any criticism that rises above the level of a quibble, and I don’t have many of those. In short, it’s basically perfect.

Given my current adoration for the Bear, I was surprised that I looked back at my 2022 list, it was only in eighth place. I don’t think it’s the case that the second season is better than the first. It’s more that taken together they make something truly remarkable. As I noted in that review, “perhaps the show’s greatest strength is that the character dynamics are so, well, dynamic.” If I might plagiarise an observation from the Watch’s Andy Greenwald, the Bear is set apart from a lot of prestige TV by the conviction that it’s characters can grow and evolve. The Wire, for example, is not only about the limits of individual agency vis a vis big structures like government, organised crime and the media, it also largely believes the same about people trying to take on their own nature. Even having discovered the contentment of a happy family life, McNulty is still inexorably pulled back towards his tendency to drink, womanise and overwork. Though it’s never pat or unidirectional, the Bear does show us characters progressively changing. The space afforded by a second season allows us to see that properly play out. Especially, turning Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ritchie from something of an antagonist at the show’s start to probably the most relatable character by the end.

Having firmly established the show’s default mode in the first season of sweaty, adrenaline pumping dashes to the plate, the second season has the scope to balance that with quieter, more reflective episodes. Notably, Forks where Ritchie winds up as fish out of water at a top end restaurant. That said when it wants to stick you back in the pressure cooker, it absolutely still can. A lot of praise rightly has been focused on Fishes, which uses perhaps the starriest array of guest stars ever assembled to flash back to a thanksgiving meal spectacularly careening out of control. However, for my money, even that was surpassed by the finale, which managed to leave me breathless, first from the tension and then the sheer emotion of its denouement.

If you’re as fascinated by the craft behind the Bear as I am, then it’s worth checking out this interview with Ebon Moss-Bachrach and showrunner Christopher Storer on the making of Forks:

The resistible decline of Anglican England

A friend recently sent me a post by David Goodhew about the latest figures on attendance at Church of England ceremonies. It’s as interesting as it is depressing.

His primary focus is on how Covid has emptied out pews. However, as he makes clear what the pandemic did was at most accelerate and deepen a long-standing and apparently remorseless trend. In 2000, usual Sunday church attendance across C of E congregations was 950,000. By 2022, it was 549,000. That’s less than 1% of the population of England worshiping weekly with our national church.

That actually understates the extent of the problem. What had previously looked like bright spots, such as the growth of the Diocese of London, have largely disappeared. And the contraction is most pronounced amongst young worshipers. In just 3 years the number of children in Anglican churches has dropped 23%.

As Goodhew writes:

“Where the C of E goes next can be seen by looking at other denominations in England. The United Reformed Church … is leading the trend of mainline decline. In 1972 it had 192,000 members. By 2022 it had 37,000 members. In 50 years, it has shrunk by over 80 percent. The bulk of its existing churches are small and elderly. This is what ecclesial collapse looks like. British Methodism is on the same path.

“The trajectory of the church will take a little longer, but in many places it is the same trajectory. As congregations age, they struggle to fill key posts — wardens, treasurer. They stop being composed mostly of people in their 70s and become composed mostly of people in their 80s — and then they stop. There comes a point when decline tips over into being unviable and that point is at hand for many congregations. This won’t happen everywhere immediately, but it is happening and at speed.”

Perhaps strangely, I don’t really put this down to secularisation per se. Britain’s spiritual beliefs are changing and we are collectively becoming less likely to believe in God. However, it is a fairly gradual transition compared with the vertiginous decline in active participation in church life. A similar story can be told about Christian identity. Many more people seem willing to participate in occasional Anglican rituals like christenings, funerals, or Christmas services. It seems that English people stop regularly going to church before we stop believing a creator or seeing ourselves as Christian, not because of it.

As an alternative, I’d suggest that what’s happening to the C of E and other denominations is an example of the ‘Bowling Alone’ phenomenon identified by Robert Putnam back in the 90s. He theorised that the rise of individualised entertainment that could be consumed at home without meeting anyone else, at the time he meant TV but I guess social media would now be a bigger deal, progressively ate up more of the time that previous generations had spent on civic engagement. This can be seen not only in the decline of churches but participation in everything from bowling leagues to political parties to scout groups.

Bucking these wider social trends would almost certainly be tricky for the C of E. Difficult but not impossible. Our eighteenth and nineteenth century forebears managed to pull the church out of a previous cycle of decline. We are perhaps also better placed than some voluntary groups to compete with the lure of TV and Tik Tok as entertainment was not, or at least shouldn’t have been, at the heart of what we were offering in the first place. There may also be an unfortunate ‘gap in the market’ created by the general decline of civic institutions for churches to abate the loneliness that results.

That said, I don’t think reversing these trends is a given, let alone an inevitability. After all, it’s not like we’ve done it yet.

More speculatively, I worry that the church might have a particular problem. My anecdotal impression is that the majority of congregations interested in pro-actively inviting new people to join – perhaps we could call this ‘evangelism’ – are generally committed to a set of theological shibboleths on everything from hell to same-sex relationships that most people rightly recognise as incompatible with a vision of a loving God. Conversely, those parishes that practice a more inviting kind of Christianity seem disinclined to, well, invite people to participate in it.

I think the logic of the latter position tends to be that we do not want to impose our ideas on others. And in any case isn’t what we can do for the community beyond our church walls more important than padding out our attendance numbers?

This is understandable but misguided. Sharing ideas and trying to make a persuasive case for them is not the same as imposing them on someone. A refusal to try and win others round to our point of view may seem like a sign of open mindedness. In reality, it reflects an expectation of mutual close mindedness. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes in his book Cosmopolitanism the result of saying “from where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right” is that there is nothing further to say. “From our different perspectives, we would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss?” Rather than promoting dialogue “it’s just a reason to fall silent”.

It’s also not the case that trying to encourage people to join our congregations is in tension with helping people who never attend church. Indeed, it’s essential. A church cannot help anyone if it doesn’t exist. And as we saw, it’s not like the C of E is in danger of vaingloriously accumulating ever more bums in pews. Many of its congregations could disappear. And if they do, they won’t be hosting food banks, fundraising for water pumps in the Global South, recruiting prison visitors, hosting lunches for lonely retirees, running youth groups, nor sending someone to check on those unwell or bereaved. That all goes.

In a funny way, the more tolerant and progressive a faith you profess, the more you’ll need to be recruiting new members. We don’t tend to place barriers like the threat of shunning or eternal damnation in the way of people who want to leave. So, people will leave. Similarly, we don’t tend to stigmatise people if they decide their journey in life doesn’t involve marriage and lots of children. So, we cannot rely on ‘demographic’ growth to replace the people who leave. Hence, sharing our faith isn’t simply a requirement for our congregations to grow, but for them to do anything other than gradually fade away.

Also, let’s be clear about this: something valuable happens in church. That’s why we go. We have substantial research evidence that being part of a religious community is good for your physical and mental health and facilitates trust in our neighbours and giving to charity. Why? Because it helps us to meet people, to make friends, to find creative ways to express ourselves, to make the space to reflect on big questions, and of course to connect with our creator and hear his words. We don’t have to justify our churches solely by the good works it does. Those activities are meritorious in their own regard, but so is being part of a church community. It is an experience we should cherish and we should be unapologetic about wanting to share it widely – before it’s too late.

Image credit: By Ethan Doyle White – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79257810