The best TV of 2023

It was a year of departures, exits and farewells. Many of the best TV experiences of 2023, such as Succession, Top Boy, Happy Valley, Barry, Endeavour and Ghosts, were valedictory seasons. But while these shows were allowed to go out on a high, with finely crafted final episodes, other programmes weren’t so lucky. Promising series just getting into their stride, such as Amanda Peet’s campus comedy The Chair (Netflix), Armando Ianucci’s sci-fi comedy Avenue 5 (Sky) and Joe Cornish’s supernatural fantasy drama Lockwood & Co. (Netflix), all got it in the neck this year after just one or two seasons.

Similarly, pre-existing original series started vanishing from their US streaming platforms, shelved as cost-saving exercises by an industry gradually waking up to the realisation that streaming is an awful business model. On HBO alone, this included such well-regarded series as Love Life (available in the UK on BBC iPlayer), Mrs. Fletcher and Westworld (both on Sky Go).

The knock-on problem, of course, is that when a streaming platform starts deep-sixing its own shows, especially the more adventurous and daring ones, viewers lose even more faith in the brand. Such platform loyalty wasn’t helped in 2023 by the WGA and Sag-Aftra strikes, in which Hollywood writers and actors demanded, among other things, redress for the paltry payments and residuals handed out to them for working on streaming content.

Distrust of the TV industry was compounded by the release of Maureen Ryan’s book Burn It Down, which attempted to expose the toxic culture of abuse at the heart of modern Hollywood. In interviews, Ryan stressed that her book only just scratches the surface of the industry, saying “We didn’t fix it. Please let’s not all pat ourselves on the back.” It would have been helpful to affix Ryan’s quote to the year’s glut of documentaries on such industry abusers as Bill Cosby, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile. Neil McKay’s ill-judged Savile drama The Reckoning (BBC1) was at least a drama devoid of self-congratulation, instead infused with a despairing air of cultural redundancy in its after-the-fact attempt to seek retribution. That was certainly preferable to George Kay’s seven-part Peter Sutcliffe drama The Long Shadow (ITV), which purported to focus on the female victims but gradually morphed into a standard 70s detective drama; or Joe Murtagh’s misguided six-part drama The Woman in the Wall (BBC1), which used the scandal of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries as the backdrop to an increasingly silly gothic procedural centred around yet another male detective.

You were left thinking that male dramatists shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near such subjects, or that they should be tackled only in documentaries. Certainly, two of the finest nonfiction programmes of the year, Nic Young’s hour-long film How the Holocaust Began and James Bluemel’s five-part Once upon a Time in Northern Ireland (both BBC2) took vast, complicated subjects and unpacked them with intelligence, sensitivity and humanity, while Todd Austin’s The Gold: the Inside Story quietly and methodically questioned the sillier speculative aspects of Neil Forsyth’s six-part drama The Gold, about the 1983 Brinks-Mat bullion robbery (both BBC1).

In fact, it was left to Russell T. Davies to show how best to blend fact and drama in his three-part miniseries Nolly (ITV), about the rise and fall of Noele Gordon, star of the TV soap Crossroads (1964-81). Blessed with a lead performance by Helena Bonham Carter that was simultaneously defiant and vulnerable, Davies gave us a series that was both a wry social history of 70s Britain and a melancholy rumination on fame and loneliness. Arriving back in March, the same month that Steven Knight’s didactic and interminable adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (BBC1) hit our screens, it offered some reassurance that subtlety and subtext are not a dying art. That was also the month of the final season of Russell Lewis’s Morse prequel Endeavour (ITV), a series that – in contrast to The Woman in the Wall – took the nostalgic British police procedural and transformed it into a quietly complex disquisition on male loneliness, duty and friendship.

Shows that played with genre expectations were a highlight of 2023. Take The Diplomat (Netflix), in which former West Wing writer Debora Cahn repurposed the high-stakes geopolitical thriller into a witty, screwball-fast show about relationships – the political, the personal and the crossover between the two. Similarly, Adjani Salmon’s sitcom Dreaming Whilst Black (BBC3) took the formula of the British workplace comedy and transformed it into a timely satire on race, diversity and the British media industry, while Lee Sung-jin’s Beef (Netflix) was both a zany road-rage comedy and a painful drama about self-worth, mental health and the debilitating expectations of modern life in the Asian American community.

The finest example of genre remodelling was arguably Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky’s Jury Duty (Amazon Freevee). Set inside a fake courtroom, the show followed a young man, 30-year-old solar-panel installer Ronald Gladden, who believes he’s taking part in a documentary about the US legal system. However, everyone else in the ‘documentary’ is an actor whose job it is to enlist Gladden in ever more absurd scenarios. In the wrong hands this could be excruciating, but Jury Duty succeeds because its goal is not to mock or deride but to seek out a person’s better nature and in Gladden they seemed to have found the nicest person in America, resulting in a kind-hearted cross between Parks and Recreation and The Truman Show.

An inherent sense of kindness and gentleness seemed to be the secret weapon of many of 2023’s best shows, from the bond of trust that grew between Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in Craig Mazin’s post-apocalyptic quest narrative The Last Of Us (HBO/Sky) to the tender friendship between the 13ft-tall Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) and his normal-sized girlfriend Flora (Olivia Washington) in Boots Riley’s messy but well-meaning political coming-of-age parable I’m a Virgo (Amazon Prime).

Yet, in the end, the shows that perhaps resonated most this year were those that best captured our age’s political and cultural lunacies. Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s sketch show I Think You Should Leave (Netflix) felt like the only show that perfectly grasped the mania and dislocation that come from being online for too long, but also the horrible social awkwardness that can ensue when we then attempt to navigate the pitfalls of the real world.

And finally, the victory of Tom Wambsgans in the final season of Succession (HBO/Sky) was, perhaps, the perfect feel-bad ending for the year, an image of faceless corporate victory that perfectly summed up the privilege, the hubris and the self-deceit at the heart of our toxic media empires. Merry Christmas.