As 2023 winds down, peak TV shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, the roster of high-profile, high-production-value, megawatt-star-studded series – from major streamers like Netflix, as well as smaller platforms – felt more packed than ever this year, with some of our most culture-defining moments taking place on the small screen. (Take, for one random example, the series finale of Succession.)
Need help navigating it all? Let this list of our favourite TV shows of 2023 – from brand-new series to standout new seasons – be your guide. Happy watching!
Happy Valley: Season 3
After a seven-year hiatus, Sally Wainwright’s crime masterpiece Happy Valley returned with a splashy New Year’s Day slot on the BBC. And if anyone was worried that the lengthy window between this series and the last would have seen Sarah Lancashire’s beloved police sergeant Catherine Cawood mellow out, they needn’t have. Opening with the discovery of a dead body in a quarry – which, of course, turns out to have a link to Catherine’s eternal foil, the now jailed Tommy Lee Royce, played once again with devilish charm by James Norton – she quickly reprimands her fellow officers after they make a patronising comment to her with: “I’ll leave it to you – twats.” (Catherine, never change.) With more twists and turns than you can shake a truncheon at – and typically breathtaking performances by Lancashire and Siobhan Finneran as her meek sister, Claire – Happy Valley has burnished its reputation as one of the greatest British dramas of the past decade. – Liam Hess
Stonehouse
Stonehouse, a slyly dark and funny enactment of a bizarre episode from 1970s British politics, is a campy and expertly acted delight. The draw here is Matthew Macfayden, on loan from Succession and playing John Stonehouse, a Labour MP who fakes his own death to avoid an espionage scandal and flees to Australia. Macfayden lines Stonehouse’s buffoonery with sociopathic cruelty, badly mistreating his wife (Keeley Hawes, who is Macfayden’s actual wife) and doubling down on his bad behaviour along the way to near redemption. At just three episodes, this is high-minded, briskly effortless entertainment. – Taylor Antrim
The Last of Us
When it came to adapting The Last of Us, HBO had something of a conundrum on its hands. Based on a beloved video game that has sold an eye-popping 37 million copies, it came with a built-in fan base who made it clear from the first announcement onwards that they were expecting it to hew as closely to the source material as possible; for those unfamiliar with the game or with a certain level of snobbery around video games, it also had to make the case that the medium could serve as a launchpad for gripping television. They needn’t have worried: the show generated the kind of water cooler conversation that is HBO’s hallmark, with the powerfully understated performances of its two leads, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, earning particular praise. – LH
Swarm
This offbeat series from Janine Nabers and producer Donald Glover stars Dominique Fishback as Dre, a super fan with eyes for one act only. Dre expects her fellow fans to maintain the same extreme level of devotion she possesses, and that leads her to some very dark places. As Janelle Okwodu wrote, “She isn’t a hero, victim or a reliable narrator, but culled from celebrity stan culture and a mishmash of meme-worthy real-world events. Dre is a villain fit for Gen Z.”
Beef
In Beef, Steven Yeun goes head to head with Ali Wong – two performers who are powerfully twitchy and captivatingly unhinged in this Netflix show produced by A24. Yeun plays a less-than-gainfully-employed handyman, while Wong plays an entrepreneur who has built a business hawking the kinds of air plants you can’t escape whenever you enter a West Elm. He’s feeling guilty that his parents lost their motel and had to return to Korea while his deadbeat brother trades crypto; she’s dealing with the stress of attempting to sell her company to something like a Home Depot while her sculptor husband fiddles with his clay pots at home. Both these characters are feeling quite aggrieved, and when their paths literally collide in a road-rage incident, each becomes the target of the other’s ire. The show is dark and comic at the same time, a satire with its teeth sunk into some uncomfortable realities. – Chloe Schama
Succession: Season 4
The frenzy-inducing fourth and final season of Jesse Armstrong’s media industry epic saw patriarch Logan Roy meet his demise in a shocking early twist, and – after a flurry of ill-advised manoeuvres, seismic betrayals, a dramatic election, and an equally dramatic funeral – the reins of Waystar Royco finally be handed over to (spoiler alert) Alexander Skarsgård’s Lukas Matsson and his US CEO, Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom Wambsgans. For Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook), it was an utterly devastating gut-punch of an ending – and one that will ensure that the show is remembered as one of the decade’s best. – Radhika Seth
Dead Ringers
Dead Ringers stars Rachel Weisz as a pair of twin gynaecologists – one of whose dubious ethical approach to the job ends up putting them both in jeopardy – and has been adapted by the white-hot writer Alice Birch, whose previous credits include Lady Macbeth and Normal People. The series is a gender-swapped update of David Cronenberg’s grisly 1988 horror-thriller of the same name, which starred Jeremy Irons as the lead. But in this version, Weisz commands the show. In the long tradition of “how did she do that” performances, she embodies the two very different sisters with exacting attention, somehow playing off herself to create a compelling and complex dynamic between them. The show is somewhere between satire, sci-fi and pitch-dark drama, but it also has a strong strain of feminism running through it. The opening episode, with its graphic depictions of childbirth is like nothing else we’ve ever seen on television. Set against that sometimes gruesome, sometimes miraculous backdrop, you can understand the sisters’ somewhat unhinged desires to improve the lot of women. – LH & CS
The Diplomat
As Chloe Schama wrote when she interviewed Keri Russell earlier this year, this delightful Netflix show “reads something like a cross between The West Wing and Homeland (its showrunner, Debora Cahn, worked on both), with fast-paced banter laced with DC jargon and the looming backdrop of current events foregrounding the interpersonal struggles.” The Diplomat follows Kate, the newly installed US ambassador to Britain who would much rather be dealing with terrorist threats and other matters of high profile diplomacy than maintaining America’s special relationship with its friend across the pond. In fact, it’s somewhat confounding to her why she has ended up in this plush position – just one of the many diplomatic tangles that she must unravel. The show is delightfully fast-paced, matching the political drama with the marital one, and daring you to choose which you find more enthralling.
Jury Duty
Jury Duty is easy to miss – it streams, after all, on Amazon Freevee – but fans of the faux-doc stylings of Christopher Guest and The Office (for which Jury Duty co-creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky both served as writers, directors and executive producers) would do well to seek it out. The series’s basic premise is that Ronald, a (very tall) solar contractor from San Diego, has been summoned to jury duty – only the whole thing is actually fake and, unbeknownst to him, the other jurors, and the judge, and the defendants, et cetera, are all actors. (These include Emmy nominee James Marsden, playing a spectacularly annoying version of himself, whom Ronald eventually recognises from X-Men.) It’s very stupid – for one thing, the “civil trial” involves a man who passed out and urinated in a pile of T-shirts – but sweet Ronald, with his perfect patience with his fellow jurors, including the weird guy obsessed with cybernetics (for whom Ronald screens A Bug’s Life to make him feel more seen; could you weep?) and the one trying to determine if his girlfriend is cheating on him in Mexico (“I wouldn’t trip,” is Ronald’s sage advice), all but steals the show. – Marley Marius
The Bear: Season 2
No longer the rocket-ship word-of-mouth sensation it was last year, The Bear arrived this season with major expectations. We’re happy to report it has, for the most part, lived up to or even exceeded them. The new season is tonally more ambitious and more expansive in its settings – and we appreciate the new range. “This is one of the best-written shows streaming, and the charisma of its cast is impossible to manufacture,” as Taylor Antrim wrote.
Barry: Season 4
As Antrim wrote of the series’s trajectory, back when the final season of this groundbreaking show was about to begin, “Bill Hader’s gloriously unpredictable thriller comedy about a hitman in Hollywood has gone from an amusing curiosity to something close to a darkland masterpiece.” Season four, directed entirely by Hader, starts with Barry in prison for murder. “This is a project,” Antrim noted, “that will forever be defined by its star and co-creator.”
