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:
Matter Of Facts 