PremiumThe 10 Best TV Shows Of 2023 That You May Have Missed
Amid the hype over prestige TV like Succession and The Last Of Us, these shows still managed to leave a lasting impression in 2023.
Last Updated: 03.39 PM, Dec 25, 2023
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AT parties over this holiday season, every one of your friends will be name dropping shows like HBO’s Succession and The Last of Us, FX’s The Bear and Reservation Dogs and Netflix’s Beef. Here are 10 shows that might have slipped under your radar.
A Murder At The End Of The World
Emma Corrin playing Darby Hart, a 24-year-old “Gen Z Sherlock Holmes” is at the heart of two competing narratives in A Murder At The End Of The World. In one, she’s a teenager tracking down serial killers with her ex-boyfriend (Harris Dickinson) using their hacking skills. And in the other, she has written a true-crime book and reflecting on the breakdown of her teenage romance. Occasionally, these two arcs compete with each other, but the show uses these movements between timelines to investigate the different murders and the shift between present and past to think through contemporary concepts and concerns like AI, robotics, women and violence, masculinity and the abuse of power. It comments on these concerns through the clever mixing of the classic television formats of a love story and a whodunit to produce something fresh and fascinating to devour.
A Murder At The End Of The World is available to stream on Disney+ Hotstar.
The magnetic Rachel Weisz dazzles in her dual role as the twin obstetricians Beverly and Elliot Mantle in this miniseries that shares the same name and central conceit as the 1988 David Cronenberg film but isn’t a replica at all. And finally, a show where the gender-swap of the central characters feels poignant and pushes the possibility of the source material’s parameters. Here, the Mantles being women (the original featured Jeremy Irons in the dual roles) opens the door for an investigation into our gendered relationship with pregnancy that’s critical but still chilling in its explorations. And yet, it is funny – laugh out loud – in the midst of being a frightening and stylish show about medical gore.
Fellow Travelers
In April of 1953, President Dwight D Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 allowed for American society’s homophobia to be weaponised against queer government employees. It’s called the Lavender Scare, which led to thousands of gay men and lesbians losing their jobs, and some of the brutal investigations even ended in suicides.
This show is based on the bestselling novel Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon, and it traverses the three-decade long romance of Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (played by Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (played by Johnathan Bailey). The chemistry between these two characters is erotic and electric — it’s steamy hot, and you’ll need a cold shower after these scenes. But these are interludes between the oppressive environment of bigotry and homophobia. While we think we have travelled far from those terrible times, Fellow Travelers reminds us that the past eerily runs in parallel with the present.
I’m A Virgo
This is the first TV series from writer-director Boots Riley. Riley’s previous work, his first film, Sorry to Bother You, journeyed with a Black telemarketer who successfully employs “white voice” to improve his sales. In both these works, Riley focusses his studied stylings to present the everyday experiences of young, Black Americans.
Jharrel Jerome plays Cootie, a 13-foot teenager raised by Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo) and Martisse (Mike Epps) – his aunt and uncle – away from society in Oakland. But he can’t be kept away from the world any longer and deep dives into it. It’s a superbly-executed telling of the evergreen fish-out-of-water comedy television trope. Yet it is skilled enough to step out and make critical commentary on race relations in America without being preachy. Even visually, Riley pushes boundaries, never relying on CGI but using forced perspective, puppets, miniature set design and clever camera tricks to show us Cootie’s size.
Mrs Davis
A bike-riding, ass-kicking nun named Simone (Betty Gilpin) sets out on a quest to find the Holy Grail at the insistence of Mrs Davis, an AI assistant like Siri or Alexa. While Simone is on the quest, she’s still fighting the power — in this she’s accompanied by her cowboy ex-boyfriend Wiley (Jake McDorman) and his dorky band of rebels.
There’s action, adventure and thrill. Mrs Davis also skips through being an alarmist programme, a bizarre comedy, an interrogation of organised religion, the questioning of the role of women in religion and technology and maybe one more thing that emerges from this cocktail of genres — but it is one we happily gulped. There’s way too much going on and that’s just fine! In fact, it’s challenging and it’s great.
Grieving is a process: a difficult, deflating and dithering one. There are no shortcuts, one has got to wade through the muck. Apple TV’s Shrinking jumps into this process, feet first; meaning it is awkward and affable. Jason Segal plays Jimmy, a widowed father and therapist, who begins to colour outside the lines in his practice as a way of coming to terms with the loss of his wife. He starts being radically honest with his patients; not always a great idea.
Jimmy’s support system — his teen daughter (Lukita Maxwell), his grumpy mentor (Harrison Ford), his chatterbox coworker (Jessica Williams), his violent but still vulnerable client (Luke Tennie) and his sharp but kind neighbour (Christa Miller from Scrubs) — aren’t always graceful or generous in their gestures of showing up. Rather, each one of them is dealing with their own stuff while trying to still support this grieving figure. This makes Shrinking a funny but important commentary on the many paths that the people around us might take to demonstrate care, concern and community. Not all of them are straight and clear-cut, but they could make us laugh along the way. Bonus: Harrison Ford is hilarious!
Somebody Somewhere
The feeling of ‘I don’t really know where I belong’ creeps up on all of us. In HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, it scratches at the heart of cabaret performer and comedian Bridget Everett’s Sam. She’s back in her Kansas hometown to take care of her sick, queer sister, who has since passed away. She’s rebuilding her life, working on a friendship with a high school classmate Joel (Jeff Hiller), literally finding her voice with a childhood vocal coach, rekindling a relationship with her other sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) and taking care of her mother. Everett’s Sam wants to run away but finds the beauty in staying. This is a quiet, intelligent show — on the surface, it seems unremarkable but each of the characters are remarkably relatable — and real.
Two seasons of Somebody Somewhere are available to stream on Jio Cinema.
The Other Two
This show premiered in 2019 with a simple, straightforward storyline: An overnight teen pop sensation has two underachieving adult siblings riding his coattails to success. Over three seasons, it has been plumped, pinched and plucked into an acidic, sharp but always funny commentary on the absurdities of celebrity and fame. Each character — ChaseDreams (Case Walker), Pat (Molly Shannon), Cary (Drew Tarver), Brooke (Heléne Yorke), Ken Marino as Chase’s manager — are employed like a sniper’s bullet to bring down the different arms of the industry that props up celebrity. Its third and final season is superlative. It features a caper on the transporting of a teen’s armpit photographer, an actor who takes method acting too seriously, obsessed parasocial relationships, fickle politics, wild ambition and everything else about wanting to be famous. The Other Two delivers on the poignancy and the punchlines without favouring either entirely.
All three seasons of The Other Two are available to stream on Jio Cinema.
Everybody’s favourite vampire housemates returned in the fifth season of this wonderfully weird show. Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo Cravens (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) venture out of their dank home into the world of Staten Island to great comedic effect. Nadja finds her community in “Little Antipaxos”, Colin Robinson runs for local government, Nandor joins a gym, and Laszlo attempts to help Guillermo, who is tackling his stunted transformation into a vampire.
Every line is laugh out loud funny. Every glance will have you cracking up. It begins as absurd and then keeps piling it on. You’ll have the best ab workout laughing through this show — but quite deftly, it manages to have an intelligent conversation around the emotions in friendship and love.
Slow Horses is a spy thriller based on a series of novels by British mystery writer Mick Herron. Instead of the top dogs of MI5, it centres on the characters of Slough House, a subdivision of the British intelligence agency, which is a sandbox for agents who mess up to play out their service days. This half-way home is overseen by Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman at his grimiest, grubbiest, and grossest best. He is absolutely magnificent! He treats all the misfit agents — nicknamed as “slow horses” — terribly, and it seems like he wants them to give up and quit MI5 altogether.
At Slough House, they are supposed to stay out of trouble but the slow horses find themselves in the thick of the action. They resent being thrown into it but are also thrilled to be part of anything at all. This ambivalence of feelings towards their duty makes this show relatable as compared to a similar American television show where everyone is so very serious about their job. Over its two previous six-episode seasons, it’s chosen to execute a semi-anthology structure but don’t let this stop you from diving in (the season three finale airs on December 27) at any point. Just come on in, the water is perfectly warm.