If there’s a common theme to April’s television, it’s human frailties – our flaws, and failings, especially as compared to machines (be these metal or metaphorical), and occasionally even our struggles to overcome them. Fortunately, in these TV shows written by other humans, it turns out our fleshy human imperfections actually have a charm all of their own.
Here are the biggest new TV shows of April 2023.
New TV In April 2023
1. The Good Mothers | April 5th, 2023
One of the ways The Sopranos set itself apart from other works about the mob was by having women in the cast who weren’t either a long-suffering wife and/or a tragic victim – and keeping the camera on them for longer than thirty seconds at a push. Did you know that Vito Corleone had a wife? It’s true!
So what of the mob wife in reality? Based on fact, The Good Mothers presents one of the more dramatic paths they can choose to take, where they simply get sick of it all and team up with the forces of law and order to take their mafia clan apart from within. Mob tales are no stranger to having someone turn state’s evidence, though usually this is when they have no other option, rather than on simple moral grounds.
2. Beef | April 6th, 2023
Anger, real anger, is not a pleasant thing. It makes otherwise civil, rational people behave in inexplicable ways, to say nothing of being destructive. This is why, from the outside, it’s so funny.
Stephen Yeun and Ali Wong hate each other. Hate, hate, hate, a proper, consuming rage that quickly drives them round the twist. It all kicks off over an appropriately petty inciting incident, in this case Driving While Angry, something most motorists can look at with a weary nod of recognition. Then it simply escalates, they’re tracking each other down, there’s retaliations, the trailer has more than one scene of Wong waving a gun around.
The question, then, is how far will they go? What depths of short-sighted fury will they plumb? Or, of course, will their mutual hatred turn to something else? When Hollywood casts a male lead and a female lead together it can rarely resist the urge to give them a bit of a frisson.
3. Jury Duty | April 7th, 2023
Jury Duty is the classic reality TV setup of ‘one person thinks all this is for real, but unbeknownst to them everyone else is an actor’. This is a format well-worn enough that there’s actually been an example of the form which goes full circle, where the mark is being gulled into thinking that they’re really on a real reality show.
Here the setup is, unsurprisingly, jury duty. They did get eight episodes in the can, so presumably our real person doesn’t smell a rat right away – although that doesn’t reflect brilliantly on them, given that one of their fellow jurors is James Marsden, playing himself. And the fictional trial they’re hearing will have to walk a very fine line between amusement and believability. No tax fraud, but no clown explosions either.
4. Florida Man | April 13th, 2023
Mildly amazing that no other show or film had jumped on this title already, because there’s just something about Florida and its associated men. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know how they got that way, all I know is that there’s no other two words in the language that so routinely find themselves followed by strange phrases like ‘…breaks into house and plays with toy helicopter’ or ‘…killed by pet cassowary’.
The show’s about a former cop going back to his home state – Florida – to find a gangster’s missing girlfriend. In other words, the Florida man is our main character, and absolutely nothing is off the table. This open-ended setting is a double-edged sword though, as when the only limits are those of the creator’s imagination, well, then you have to hope you’ve got a good creator.
5. Mrs. Davis | April 13th, 2023
‘From a co-executive producer of The Big Bang Theory’ are not words I would take as an unimpeachable badge of quality, especially when the promotional material describes this person as providing the show’s humour. But the concept of a nun from Reno doing battle with an artificial intelligence called Mrs. Davis seems like it will by nature get into interesting territory, even if only accidentally.
The nun (GLOW’s Betty Gilpin) is also, based on the trailer, on a quest for the Holy Grail – in a way, slightly more conventional territory for a nun. In comedy terms, though, that has officially been done. Shot through the Pythons’ quest for the grail was a deliberate undercutting of the high-fantasy pretensions of Arthurian legend, but with Mrs. Davis something like the opposite is needed. When the nun and the AI hit on a genuine point of conflict between theology and technology, we don’t want Johnny Galecki interrupting with a toilet flush.
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