The 10 best TV shows of 2023 – and the five worst
This time last year, I nearly wept at the stellar shows I had to leave out of my 2022 top 10. This year? Well, let’s just say my eyes are dry, as I recall 12 months of telly dominated by the solid yet unspectacular (The Gold, The Long Shadow, The Gallows Pole, and a whole bunch of other shows starting with the definite article). As such, I have favoured shows that dared to be a little different. The big call at No 1, however, is between two series who had to pull off the tricky task of bringing a satisfying conclusion to a long-adored drama.
10. Best Interests/The Woman in the Wall (BBC One)
A slight fudge to begin with, as these two – very different – BBC One dramas both deserve a nod. Jack Thorne’s Best Interests was, in fact, less a drama, and more a punishing endurance exercise in sustained grief and an interesting challenge to see how much liquid you could cry out of your body. Michael Sheen and Sharon Horgan were magnificent as the parents facing the most impossible decision over their terminally ill daughter. Excruciating, but brilliant. The mystery drama The Woman in the Wall, while far from perfect, should be applauded for allowing itself to be quite so bloody weird – as epitomised by Ruth Wilson’s “this goes to 11” performance.
9. Dreaming Whilst Black (BBC Three)
Beginning life as a multi-award-winning web series, Adjani Salmon’s terrific satire slipped effortlessly into its new role as BBC sitcom. The show, in which Salmon plays an aspiring filmmaker, Kwabena, is bracingly candid and extremely witty as it takes on race from all angles – from the constant microaggressions and condescension suffered by Kwabena in the film industry, to the competing demands of his Jamaican and Nigerian family cultures and the painful, well-meaning efforts of fawning white liberals. It announced Salmon – who co-wrote the show with Ali Martin – as a serious talent.
8. Beef (Netflix)
Korean writer-director Lee Sung Jin’s ferocious pitbull of a comedy-drama shows up the snobbery between cinema and TV. Were this a film, the British chatterati would never stop going on about it. Divided as it is, however, into 10 digestible episodes, it becomes yet another binge-watch people never quite get round to. People are missing out. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong star as two LA residents on the edge – he a down-on-his-luck handyman, she a chi-chi business owner on the cusp of midlife crisis – who are thrown together by a road rage incident. There begins a cat-and-mouse game of one-upmanship revenge, which morphs into something subtler, stranger and more affecting. America, however, has not been snobbish about it – it has 13 Emmy nominations.
7. Blue Lights (BBC One)
A show, I thought, that would fall into my NABCD (Not Another Bloody Cop Drama) category. What a delight, then, that Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s Northern Ireland-set thriller is as fresh as a daisy, exploring the parts other NABCDs can’t or don’t bother with. Sian Brooke leads a cast of rookie probationary officers, cutting their teeth – quickly and often traumatically – on the streets of a Belfast still riven with sectarianism. Brooke’s character is the canniest creation: an English midlife career-changer with a background in social care, a conduit who allows multiple perspectives on a troubled city.
6. The Lovers (Sky Comedy)
The romcom is having a bit of a moment on British telly of late, largely thanks to Rose Matafeo’s Starstruck. David Ireland’s wicked addition to the canon takes the romcom formula, sticks to it faithfully, while adding razor-wire around the edges. Johnny Flynn continues his rise to greatness as the pompous Seamus O’Hannigan, an English political broadcaster with Northern Irish roots, who falls for Roisin Gallagher’s chaotic, foul-mouthed, effervescent checkout girl, Janet. The beats, complications and pitfalls of the genre are all present and correct, but so too is Ireland’s jet-black, satirical obsession with the Troubles and Irish identity. What a pleasure to have Ireland – one of the best British playwrights of his generation – plying his trade on the small screen. More please.
5. The Last of Us (Sky Atlantic)
For all the accolades dolloped on top of this remarkable, dystopian zombie drama (think Cormac McCarthy does The Walking Dead), perhaps the most impressive is the fact that it has, single-handedly, managed to put to bed that hoary old cliché about video games not making for great drama. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey made for a fine mismatched pairing, as the grizzled smuggler and the infection-immune girl he must escort across a lawless US – but were almost upstaged by a single, astonishing episode in which they barely featured: the aching, utterly unexpected love story between two hard-bitten survivalists. Expect awards galore for Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
4. Everyone Else Burns (Channel 4)
It seems we live in an age where sitcoms needn’t be all that funny – see this year’s excellent, off-kilter, but largely joke-free Such Brave Girls, for example. Hallelujah, then, for Everyone Else Burns, a sitcom based around a puritanical Christian sect in Manchester that attempts to split your sides at every turn. Simon Bird – and his awful pudding-bowl haircut – anchors the mirth nicely as the batty patriarch who longs to be made an elder, but the revelation is Kate O’Flynn, as his cosseted wife. O’Flynn, long known as a strong dramatic actress, turns Fiona into a magnificently frustrated comic monster, with her buttoned-up lips constantly betrayed by her bulging eyes. O’Flynn also stole the show in sitcom Henpocalypse. Note to producers: the thesps can do comedy.
3. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (BBC Two)
James Bluemel followed his sensational documentary series Once Upon a Time in Iraq with this equally excellent account of The Troubles. As with Iraq, it is apparently simple – a judicious use of interviews and archive footage – but the effect is profound and revelatory as republicans, loyalists, soldiers, civilians and, most poignantly, the families of victims, are given the chance to reflect, without judgment or exoneration. This is television that makes you stop in your tracks, and is such essential viewing given the sectarian horrors unfolding in the Middle East. “Hate begets hate begets violence, and that’s what we did to each other here,” says one contributor.
2. Succession (Sky Atlantic)
Ignore the naysayers – this is a drama that deserves its place on TV’s Mount Olympus, alongside The Sopranos and any other prestige drama you care to mention. It took until episode three of this fourth and final series for Jesse Armstrong to finally bump off Brian Cox’s media-conglomerate Godzilla, and how skillfully it was handled, with Logan Roy lying dead on a yet-to-land private jet, while his squabbling children attempted to come up with on-the-spot eulogies via mobile phone. Armstrong then, brilliantly, denied us the funeral until episode nine. And the denouement? Well, it was never going to satisfy everyone, but to my eye it was a masterclass in betrayal, deception, anguish, spite and cold, hard inevitability.
1. Happy Valley (BBC One)
No Reichenbach Falls; no O.K. Corall, no Throne Room of the Death Star. That kind of nonsense was never going to do for Sally Wainwright, who gave us our climactic scene between Sarah Lancashire’s Catherine Cawood and James Norton’s Tommy Lee Royce over a wooden kitchen table. Wainwright brought her brutal and blistering ballad of the Calder Valley to an end in a peerless third series, eschewing easy answers as Royce attempted to re-enter the life of his son, Ryan. Lancashire tends, understandably, to pick up the superlatives for her performance, but there was no finer moment on television this year than seeing Norton wrestle with Royce’s conflicted, conflicting final thoughts. A man portrayed as the devil brought tears to eyes as he asked Cawood to “be there” for Ryan.
And the five worst…
5. The Reckoning (BBC One)
Ethical considerations aside, this drama about Jimmy Savile creaked and groaned and failed.
4. Citadel (Amazon Prime)
$300 million. 240 minutes of video-game shoot-em-up nonsense. Criminal.
3. Great Expectations (BBC One)
Steven Knight makes Dickens swagger, brawl and swear. Rubbish.
2. Next Level Chef (ITV1)
The worst Gordon Ramsay cooking show yet. Next level nonsense.
1. The Idol (Sky Atlantic)
Juvenile, misogynistic trash. HBO has even cancelled the show after one series. Good riddance.
