10 Best New TV Shows of 2023

Are we still in the golden age of television? It would be weird if a period reckoned to have begun sometime in the mid-to-late ‘90s hadn’t ended yet. Wiki cites the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as the real nail in the coffin, though the notoriously disappointing end of Game Of Thrones is clearly a marker for the prestige hour-long drama being knocked off let’s say its perch.

2023, at least, didn’t see any slip-ups on that scale (it may well be a feat never to be repeated). Nor did it find itself in the awkward position of – as 2022 did – having even the biggest new contenders effortlessly overshone by the heartwrenching climax of a titan like Better Call Saul.

So what position has this year’s best TV found itself in? The overriding theme of – maybe not all of it, but a lot of it, is that of being a justifiably aggrieved outsider. Now, this can come in all sorts of forms: perhaps you’re one of the few not linked into a global artifical intelligence, perhaps you’re mixed-race in medieval Japan, perhaps you’re 13 feet tall. These likely aren’t situations you’ve ever found yourself in, but the artistry is in letting you know exactly how you might feel if you were.

 

10. I’m A Virgo

June’s I’m A Virgo was an all-time contender for titles burying the lede – Virgo though Jharrel Jerome’s sheltered Cootie might have been, very few people would notice that before noticing the man’s thirteen feet tall. And it doesn’t throw this down then walk away either, engaging in rarely-found intimate detail with what it actually means to be over twice the size of a normal human. The amount he has to eat is just the start.

Up against a cast with special abilities of their own, like super-speed, psychic theatre, and in one case simply being a billionaire, I’m A Virgo invites comparisons with the glut of superhero media out there. But it keeps things on a firmly human level, not the open CGI warfare of Marvel films nor the parodic splatteriness of stuff like The Boys, it keeps at its core the kind of tale of a natural outsider that some of the best stories are made of.

I’m A Virgo was probably at its most superhero-y in its star turn from Walton Goggins, playing the kind of figure who provides an uncomfortable reminder of what vigilante justice actually looks like. This is a dynamic the genre’s been wrestling with since Watchmen and before, but it’s hard to top having someone like The Gog play it out.

 

9. Poker Face

A Natasha Lyonne vehicle, eager to make use of the unstoppable combo of that voice and that hair, Poker Face sees her ability to detect lies turn her into an ad hoc detective – much to the displeasure of the casino where she works as a cocktail waitress. That doesn’t last long though, with the vestigial overarching story taking a back seat to classic-model episodic mysteries in the style of Columbo, where you the viewer know what happened and the fun is in seeing them work it out.

And like Columbo before it, while Lyonne’s in the middle of Poker Face she’s not necessarily the centrepiece. Each week’s fresh mystery gets its own rotating cast of big names enjoying themselves as shady characters, tough guys, unassuming types with dark secrets – basically everything you’d hope for from murder mysteries. That’s not just limited to celebrities coming in to ham it up as the villain du jour, either. What Poker Face gets right, throughout, is the sense of justice detective fiction simply can’t function without. That there is someone on the case, and a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

8. Boiling Point

A spinoff of the marvellous single-shot 2021 film, Boiling Point’s small-screen continuation throws us right back in at the ugly end of the restaurant business. It’s no longer one extended tracking shot, but in spite of that still has all the immediacy it did when we were hanging on their shoulders – it’s too hot in the kitchen and there’s about twenty more things screaming for your prompt attention.

For all the praise The Bear attracted as realistic look into the rough end of the food service industry, it’s hard to argue Boiling Point doesn’t pip it in that regard – not needing to reach for Hollywood nonsense like people announcing how they feel, or waving guns around, able to get more than enough melodrama out of the simple matter of getting plates out and set down in front of endless hungry mouths. Steven Graham’s best known for playing raving maniacs, but give me a slice of him as he struggles through another working day any time.

 

7. The Gold

February’s The Gold was a heist show that got the heist itself out of the way very quickly, because the more interesting parts were what came after it – and this is speaking factually, The Gold is based on the real-life Brinks-Mat bullion robbery of 1983. If there’s one thing more complicated than shifting £26 million in hooky gold, it’s trying to bring the people doing that to justice.

More than a heist show, it quickly ends up bearing more of the hallmarks of a full-on spy drama: the criss-crossing Europe, the Swiss bank accounts, and the lurking fear that this, regrettably, is how the world really works. And it’s helped no end in that regard by being a true story, it’s a dramatisation but it simply doesn’t feel like fiction.

Hugh Bonneville, Charlotte Spencer, and Emun Elliott make up the kind of crew you’d want to watch investigating any high-level heist. On the other side of the divide you’ve got Dominic Cooper, Jack Lowden, and Tom Cullen as lovably awful spivs, for whom all the charming cheeky-chappiness in the world can’t rehabilitate them when they tell the jury “I hope you all die of cancer”.

 

6. Beef

April’s Beef was quickly heralded as one of the best shows of the year – a frighteningly relatable portrait of how two people’s grinding, everyday frustrations can boil over at the slightest spark. For Ali Wong and Stephen Yeun this comes with an episode of road rage, although with the many petty complaints of their lives bubbling under their skin, it’s more like a road screaming fury.

Instead of simply going on their way spitting poison under their respective breath, Wong and Yeun turn their infuriating ships-in-the-night meeting into a full-on war – a florid illustration of the kind of lower impulses you too probably feel, to turn a minor irritation into a vicious extended vendetta, where you scorch the earth and sow your enemy’s fields with salt. I’m not saying I’d do that, just that I understand why they would.

Perhaps the most refreshing part of Beef was it simply letting its leads be unsympathetic. An awful lot of media labours under the delusion that all their characters – especially their main characters – have to be Dudley Do-Right. If Wong and Yeun thought at any moment, for instance, “maybe I shouldn’t break into their house” it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

 

5. The Last Of Us

The original The Last Of Us videogame was beloved for its storyline more than anything, which made it a perfect candidate for an adaptation – and though popular videogames have burned TV and film producers many, many, many times before, here everything fell into place when Joel and Ellie were brought to live-action life by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

It wasn’t a one-to-one recreation of the game (after all, then you could have just played the game), but that was to its strength. Some bits that are enthralling when they’re interactive simply don’t work when you’re sitting back watching them, and vice-versa. And no work of filmed media would dare match the sheer number of ‘silent takedowns’ – throttling an unsuspecting target from behind – that five minutes of the game would involve.

One part that was straight from the game, and hence managed to weed out the fake fans very quickly, was the shocking inclusion of a conventionally masculine gay man. This, bizarrely, managed to briefly become some kind of controversy, one that only managed to bring yet more public attention to The Last Of Us’s TV incarnation.

 

4. Blue Lights

Billed as a simple matter of some raw recruits starting out in the Northern Irish police, Blue Lights ended up having far higher stakes than a newly minted copper is at all likely to encounter – but for all that still didn’t feel completely implausible. For all the lovable parochialism, Northern Ireland has a bit of a history, as any fan of Derry Girls will be able to tell you.

Perhaps what helps is that they’re being thrown in at the deep end, out onto those mean streets in much the same way as the viewer is every time they vicariously live through a police procedural. Though in their shoes, we could only wish that our supervisor would have even half the charm Richard Dormer’s grizzled longtoothed veteran does here.

For all its slightly jazz-hands use of the area’s paramilitary past, Blue Lights perfectly captures the odd-couple dynamics so beloved of the detective drama, that will inevitably arise when you sling two people in a squad car together. It’s a real cross-section they present us, some of them are well-meaning, some of them are incompetent, but crucially they’re never boring.

 

3. Mrs. Davis

Mrs. Davis is an exercise in seeing just how much fun you can have playing around with big, meaty, existential concepts – artificial intelligence, our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, the hunt for the Holy Grail – and the answer is, a lot of fun indeed. There’s in-universe reasons for the choir of people singing ‘Electric Avenue’ or the wheatfield full of grand pianos, sure there are, but they’re mainly there as expressions of pure joie de vivre. You know it, and the show does too.

As I wrote at the time, creator Damon Lindelof seemed to be bringing out a lot of the same eyecatching tropes and indulgent imagery he’d deployed in his fundamentally muddled ‘remix’ of Watchmen. But this time, not hampered by the delusion he was making an incredibly important statement about racism, they all turned out to work really well.

For all the grandiose backdrops and fanciful concepts in play, though, Mrs. Davis’s real heart is in its gentler, interpersonal moments. It’s to Betty Gilpin’s credit that she carries this off while also being a cool motorcycle nun, which is an archetype television really doesn’t see enough of. And her opposites, Jake Dorman and Andy McQueen, certainly provide something for the mams in the audience.

 

2. Blue Eye Samurai

For all the floundering about digging two graves, tales of revenge like November’s Blue Eye Samurai are something we simply can’t get enough of. Especially if the revenge provides a ready-made excuse for a man-with-no-name type to go off the leash and skip around in some incredibly bloody and violent action sequences.

Here the big twist – and they present it as more of a twist than it is – is that our Blue Eye Samurai is actually a lady-with-no-name. Does this hamper her spirited efforts to kill lots of people with a sword? Not in the slightest, if anything it spurs her on further thanks to the casual bigotry floating about in Edo period Japan.

But the twist isn’t the big draw here. It’s unapologetically action-oriented enough you can’t call it style over substance, but the style’s the one to write home about – an absolutely gorgeous backdrop of snowcapped medieval Japan, punctuated liberally with splashes of blood. This is Netflix’s answer to the blockbuster action flick, and it’s one they can be proud of.

 

1. Boat Story

Finally, beating off stiff competition all around, we’ve got Boat Story, which was one of those classic narrative kick-offs – Daisy Haggard and Paterson Joseph get the break of a lifetime when they stumble across a boat that’s washed up with two corpses and a whole lot of cocaine on it. This immediately makes a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.

Whereas your Fargos and Breaking Bads – other tales of in-over-their-head clots – can seldom resist taking things too seriously, Boat Story is aware from the title onwards that it is a story, and never stops playing around with its own storytelling. That isn’t to say it can’t present serious moments when it wants to, but more than anything, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, even in its treatment of serious and bloody crimes.

With its clear core group of dramatis personae, Boat Story sometimes feels like a stage play, especially when it reinterprets its own events as a stage play. And while ‘play’ is definitely the operative word, there’s a playfulness and jollity here you don’t find often, Boat Story also pulls off the rare trick of not letting this merry spirit puncture the tension. Even with flash-forwards to after the action is over, it still keeps you guessing.

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