‘Dead Ringers’ is the Best Show of 2023 (That You Almost Certainly Didn’t Watch)

Watching Dead Ringers on Prime Video this spring reminded me of the first time I heard Ravel’s “Bolero” building in power through my parents’ stereo system. It made me think of when my sister spirited me past the tourists mimicking Rocky on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art so I could stand in front of a literal Van Gogh. Quite simply, Dead Ringers is art. As unsettling as Guernica and as lush as couture, the six-part limited series left me intoxicated. Rachel Weisz threw down not one, but two career-best performances as twin doctors Beverly and Elliot Mantle. Alice Birch‘s scripts cut into the agony and ecstasy of womanhood with the precision of one of the Mantle twins’ beloved scalpels.

Dead Ringers was so fucking good! And yet, as 2023 comes to an end, I can’t remember it ever getting the due it deserved outside of my own tight circle of critic friends. I mean, I think it’s literally just me and other Decider contributors who have repeatedly gone to bat for the show’s brilliance. To watch as far inferior limited series — particularly Prime Video’s own fine, but flimsy Daisy Jones & the Six — earn nominations, plaudits, and year end list slots, while Dead Ringers has nabbed just a sole Golden Globe nom for Weisz, makes me feel like I’m lost in one of Elliot’s manic episodes. Did I imagine that such a perfect show existed? No, like the homeless lady Elliot murders on a bender, it was real! And it was wonderful!

Dead Ringers, as the name implies, is a remake of David Cronenberg’s disturbing 1988 film about a pair of devilishly co-dependent twin gynecologists. The Prime Video series gender-flips the main characters. Elliot and Beverly are now women. One of them becomes pregnant. The other harbors an obsession with creating life in a lab. The twins’ dream to change the landscape of obstetrics is also an ambition to change what it means to be women, to be themselves.

What makes Dead Ringers so brilliant, though, is the way that its biggest scares aren’t rooted in body horror or psychological terror, but social satire. I’ve been haunted all year by the trip the Mantles take to a pharmaceutical tycoon’s upstate mansion. A table full of super wealthy assholes reveal they’ve trepanned their skulls. Bratty blonde children sing Coldplay’s “The Scientist” like it’s a hymn. An opioid pandemic heiress shrugs off her family’s contribution to the world’s death count. It’s chilling stuff! (Especially the Coldplay song!)

Dead Ringers was glorious, gorgeous, challenging fare. And I keep wondering if it turned viewers off because of that last adjective. Lord knows I love escapism as much as the next person, but what makes me feel privileged to be alive is the knowledge that there is space in our society for art like Dead Ringers. We can confront our demons, real and imagined, through the glory of art. We can confront them and be repulsed by them, terrified by them, or even aroused by them.

The echoing silence surrounding Dead Ringers‘s run depresses me because it either means that people are too incurious to appreciate a show that demands an open mind and wrapt attention or something worse: they never got a chance to see it.

If you or someone you love needs an exhilarating show to binge-watch this season, I heartily recommend Dead Ringers. I’m hoping that it’s the best show you haven’t seen this year and that we can rectify that before the ball drops on 2024.