TV I Watched in 2023
I watch a lot of movies in an average year. But I probably watch less television than the average American. I used to watch more, but I think I have increasingly traded that time in to spend on movies instead, where I can cover a lot more ground in the same time. Still, there were a number of shows I watched in 2023, some of which were quite good, and I thought I would sort of do a wrap up of them, starting with a few I watched that were fine, and ending with my favorites.
I have basically dropped out of closely following the MCU since the central nexus of relationships and stories that held everything in orbit has been retired, and I have especially not felt obligated to watch all the shows Disney has been cranking out – at a certain point it just becomes a chore. But I started the year with She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, because people seemed to like it and it seemed like a change of pace from the standard Marvel format. And you know what – it was. The show isn’t a masterpiece or anything, but it was genuinely fun and goofy in a good way, in an era when Marvel has become too self-serious and enamored with its own lore. Tatiana Maslany has terrific charisma – and the other good thing is the show is short.
I watched a couple of fantasy shows, both of which were fine but not really what they could have been. The first was The Rings of Power, the Amazon Lord of the Rings prequel. Now, you might expect me to have very strong feelings about this show, since LOTR are my favorite books, some of my favorite films, and Tolkien is a personal hero. It is therefore perhaps an indictment of the show that I actually don’t have any strong feelings about it either way. I think a younger version of myself, inculcated with a nerdy negativity from countless online takedowns, might have hated this, but I’m no longer that person. But I don’t love it either – the writing is a snooze, the pacing is strange, and while the production design looks impressively expensive, it’s too clean and shiny to match the films it’s imitating, while being too small in scale to really measure up. One part that did work for me were the Harfoots, who seem to be some sort of Hobbit ancestors. And Bear McCreary’s score is truly epic, and does manage to match the tone of Howard Shore’s without simply aping it.
The second fantasy I saw was Netflix’s Sandman adaptation. This show featured a number of excellent performances, notably Tom Sturridge in the lead role, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, and of course I am always happy to see my beloved David Thewlis in anything. Beyond that, there are a lot of interesting ideas, and one episode in particular stood out as excellent. But the show is mired by two issues. First, the pacing is very uneven, and because the season splits apart into a couple of different arcs of differing pacing and quality, it loses momentum partway through. The second issue is that the entire show has that washed-out Netflix look, with flat grey lighting, everything reduced to a digital soup. What’s the point of creative and fantastical art design if you’re not going to light and shoot (or animate it) to be vibrant and beautiful.
In the summer I watched a couple of anime shows, starting with the long-awaited second season of the often disturbing Made in Abyss. The show continues to be a dark and perverse journey through an eldritch world, with excellent animation and a great score by Kevin Penkin, but it’s not as propulsive or good as the first season, and is a bit bogged down. Then I watched Toradora!, which is a fairly normal high school slice of life/romance, which was perfectly fine but nothing to really write home about. I think I may be getting too used to the tropes at this point, or I’ve been spoiled by watching too many great shows.
That brings me to my five favorite shows I watched last year, presented in ascending order:
5. The Last of Us
It felt like everyone got into this show as soon as it came out, and I thought I’d give it a try as well. I’m not a huge zombie fan, but there have been enough good works of art that use zombies that I thought I might enjoy this, and it turned out to be a refreshingly measured and terse look at the post-apocalypse, with two megawatt stars at the center. I do think that the way things are going, Craig Mazin’s next show is likely to be shot entirely in an abandoned concrete bunker filled with leaky pipes – between this and Chernobyl, that seems like his aesthetic.
4. Star Trek: Discovery
I have now caught up through season 3 of Discovery, and it has grown on me, getting better with each season. Admittedly, I am a sucker for Star Trek, and as the show has progressed it has leaned more and more into affection for the ideals and world of Trek, without simply throwing out references for their own sake or repeating the old hits (it does that a bit at the beginning, but quickly moves on to variations on old themes). I know the show is divisive among Trekkies, but you have to credit it with restoring Star Trek to the small screen where it belongs – and this looks fantastic.
3. Chainsaw Man
Chainsaw Man is a deranged anime about a world filled with devils and people with bizarre and frankly goofy powers and characteristics. In many ways it’s willfully puerile, gross, and immature – but it’s got incredible style and energy, and you just can’t argue with that.
2. Review
Andy Daly’s Review might be the best comedy show of all time. His depiction of a man who proceeds to totally self-destruct in every way possible, all for the sake of a dumb TV show, is a train wreck I cannot look away from. In any given situation, whatever thing that could happen that would be worst and funniest always does happen, and there’s an edge-of-your-seat sense of gleeful anticipation waiting for those anvils to drop. James Urbaniak’s Producer Grant is one of the all-time great villains of television. I give Review five out of five stars.
1. Cowboy Bebop
The only show that could somehow take first place over Review is one of the great classics of sci-fi anime, Cowboy Bebop. This is so much more than a space noir, though it is that – it’s a masterwork of atmospheric engineering. There are two points, one in the middle and one at the end, where the music kicks in, and you actually feel as if you are drifting off into space, in a way that is unfathomable and transcendent.
Also, there’s a hyperintelligent space corgi.
