So here’s the second part of my personal favourite TV shows on 2023. Part 1 can be found here. Also, I doubt they’ll read this, but big thanks to the Pilot TV podcast gang, whose recommendations and reviews have long been a weekly highlight, and attending their live show earlier this year was a huge amount of fun.
Anyway, on with the second part…..
THE TOURIST
BBC (all episodes on iPlayer)
The Tourist premiered on New Years Day 2022, so it may well have flown under a lot of people’s radar when thinking of the best shows of the year. Which is a shame, as Harry & Jack Williams drama set in the Australian Outback was superb – exciting, full of twists and with a surreal sense of humour. Jamie Dorman wakes up with no memory of who he is or how he got there, and has to piece it all together.
SEVERANCE
APPLE TV+
Apple TV+ is still not seen as one of the premier streaming services, which is strange as they really knocked it out of the park with their shows this year. As it’s directed by Ben Stiller, you may think this would be a gentle workplace comedy like The Office, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a bleak, intriguing mystery about people who literally live different lives outside the office. To say too much else would be spoiling things, but this was yet another string to Apple’s television bow.
ATLANTA
DISNEY PLUS
The genius of Donald Glover has been known to a fair amount of people ever since his breakout role in Community, but Atlanta has been the show that’s defined him. After a long, pandemic-forced, break, season 3 eventually arrived this year (season 4 will also be on Disney Plus at the end of December) and showed that, if TV companies give artists free reign, sometimes gold can be produced. The loose thread running through this season of Atlanta was Earn touring round Europe with his rapper cousin Paper Boi. Yet there were also several stand-alone episodes (often not starring the rest of the cast) which were bizarre little stories about race in modern day America. The most creatively inspired show of the year.
YELLOWJACKETS
SKY ATLANTIC (all episodes on NOW)
A show about a plane crashing on a mysterious island, and the back stories of the survivors is explored…stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. Yellowjackets was, in some ways, the new Lost, but with an added freshness and some inspired casting in the adult versions of the teenage cast (welcome back, Juliette Lewis). The mystery deepened every episode, with enough clues to give some comfort that this wouldn’t end in a Lost-style purgatory conclusion. The next season is due to arrive in March.
UPRIGHT
SKY ATLANTIC (all episodes on NOW)
Tim Minchin may now be best known as a musical comedian (and, of course, the man behind the wildly successful stage version of Matilda), but Upright proved he could also be an exceptional actor when need be. The first season of Upright was a road trip where he made an unlikely pairing with teenage runaway Meg (played brilliantly by Milly Alcock, also starring this year in the Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon). It would have made a fine standalone series, but this new instalment explored the relationships between the characters even more deeply, and produced one of the most emotional, beautifully acted, endings of the year.
PACHINKO
APPLE TV+
Another winner from Apple TV+ this year was Pachinko, an adaptation of the book by Min Jin Lee. It was a big, sprawling historical fiction about a family in Korea which, like the novel, spanned a timeline from 1915 to the late 1980s. Beautifully shot and tackling themes such as racism, discrimination and the post-war relationship between Japan and Korea. Which may not sound like a fun watch, but it’s beautifully written and acted, and proved popular enough for another season to be commissioned.
HACKS
PRIME VIDEO
The first season of Hacks took seemingly forever to arrive on these shores – so much so that season 2 followed mere months after the first one. The tale of an ageing stand up comedian who’s pared with a much younger, cynical writer to revitalise her stage show was eminently watchable – Jean Smart (last seen swiping away on Fruit Ninja in Mare of Eastown) channelled her inner Joan Rivers, while Hannah Einbinder built on her reputation as one of the most promising young actors/writers around.
SHERWOOD
BBC (All episodes on iPlayer)
James Graham is one of the country’s best writers, and he followed up last year’s Quiz with this masterpiece set in his hometown of Nottingham. He also managed to gather some of the country’s finest acting talent (David Morrissey, Leslie Manville, Adeel Akhtar) for this ‘loosely based on real events’ tale of two murders in an old mining community, with the scars from the 1984-85 Miners Strike still very raw. The cliffhanger at the end of the second episode was a proper “what the hell was THAT” moment.
FOR ALL MANKIND
APPLE TV+
Ron D Moore’s ‘alternative history’ space show has a claim to being Apple’s greatest show to date (the finale to season 2 still stands as one of the best hours of TV ever made), with this season concentrating on the race to colonise Mars. There was arguably a bit too much time spent on the two weakest characters of Karen and Danny, but the spectacular space sequences and emotional sweep of the season’s arc makes the lack of award recognition for the show seem all the more puzzling.
THE REHEARSAL
Sky Comedy (all episodes on NOW)
Nathan Fielder made his name with the Comedy Central show Nathan For You in which he attempted to boost ailing businesses with ever more elaborate schemes. For his first project on HBO, he undertook his most elaborate scheme, by attempting to recreate, with actors, how it would feel to raise a child. To say too much else would spoil it, but the results are (often uncomfortably) funny and increasingly weird, especially where the boundaries between what’s real and what’s fake become increasingly blurred.
John's Random Musings 