RD Top 10 TV shows of the year 2023

Who would have thought that a TV show based on a video game could be this incredible? The Witcher was good, but this is another level (pun intended). The clues were all there—an HBO series (available to watch in the UK on Sky Atlantic), Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin adapting Druckmann’s emotionally powerful game and the casting of the phenomenal Pedro Pascal. Pascal plays Joel, a grieving father tasked with protecting a strong-headed teenage girl—Bella Ramsey’s Ella—on a journey to discover if she holds the cure to a plague of mushroom-based zombies threatening the survival of the human race.

The two stars make this thrilling story about the characters and how they cope in the horrors of a post-apocalyptic world, resulting in surprising depth and emotional impact. Plus, it shows how amazing this first season is that the best episode (indeed, the best of any show in 2023) is a powerful episode focussed on Nick Offerman’s and Murray Bartlett’s doomed lovers. A monster of a show.

Never an easy watch if you’re stressed or trying to unwind, The Bear is still one of the most compelling comedy-dramas on TV today. The second season of Christopher Storer’s show (available to stream on Disney+) sees one-time New York award-winning chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) now focussing on turning his late brother’s Chicago sandwich shop into a new restaurant called “The Bear”, with a new menu, trained staff and fixed finances.

Obviously, the anxiety runs high with the countdown to the re-opening being a seemingly insurmountable, colossal task. However, with his misfit team including the driven, talented Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and his difficult friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), you’ll be rooting for them to overcome every obstacle.

Who saw this coming? A Netflix horror-drama miniseries loosely based on the gothic works of 19th-century author and poet Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher is a revelation. Spooky and at times downright unnerving, the narrative focuses on the story of powerful and corrupt pharmaceutical CEO Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood and Zach Gildford), his genius sister and the firm’s COO Madeline (Mary McDonnell and Willa Fitzgerald) and the family being attacked by a seemingly vengeful and mysterious woman (Carla Gugino).

With the nonlinear story switching between 1953 and 2023, the horror and scope of the story slowly unfolds and engulfs you in the shadows, along with the Usher children. It's a bit like Succession meets Final Destination. Looking for an absorbing, gothic and supernatural watch? Nevermore.  

One of the cleverest, densest and most emotionally draining TV shows in recent years, HBO’s Succession (on Sky Atlantic in the UK) comes to a close with its fourth and final season. The world of multi-billion-dollar corporate contracts and familial backstabbing that sees patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) on the verge of a huge deal while his children scheme to undercut him, or even worse. No wonder he calls them “the rats”.

Delving to new dark depths, everyone is as despicable as ever and you know it’s all going to come crashing down, but you simply can’t look away from Jesse Armstrong’s jet-black comedy-drama. A suitably tragic ending to a despicably delicious show.

Hijack (Apple TV+) revives the best idea 24 ever had—TV in quasi-real time, tracking the turbulence aboard a seven-hour Dubai-London flight—while updating the look and logbooks of the 1970s disaster movie. Overseen by seasoned pros George Kay and Jim Field Smith (who ran the UK arm of Netflix’s smart interview-room drama Criminal), the central standoff cues highly pressurised games of strategy, as Idris Elba’s “business negotiator” reasons mid-air with gun-toting disruptors and a richly characterised roster of hostages.

It’s surprising how rarely anyone needs the toilet, but the suspense is well-marshalled and elevated by an exceptionally precise use of cabin space. We always know who’s where, even if twisty scripting means we’re less certain what everybody’s up to—save Elba, calmly underlining his status as among our most dependable small-screen stars. 

A clever hybrid of character comedy and hidden-cam prankery from those behind Borat and the US The Office—Jury Duty (Amazon Freevee) isn’t what it first appears. Notionally, we’re watching highlights of a three-week civil case filed against a worker accused of singlehandedly bringing down a printing company. The twist: everyone involved is an actor, bar Juror #6, sunny solar panel engineer Ronald Gladden, whose reactions to this three-ring legal circus are wholly unrehearsed.

A potentially cruel gotcha instead proves altogether genial entertainment: Gladden gets new playmates, acting lessons from fellow juror James Marsden (playing a preening variation of himself), and to lead the jury like Hank Fonda in 12 Angry Men. “We all fell in love with you,” confesses one of his co-stars after the big reveal. You might be swayed, too. 

The hero of Netflix’s pancontinental hit Lupin, back for a third instalment, is fascinating. Assane Diop (Omar Sy) is a born shapeshifter and is rarely observed wearing the same hat twice; knows the value of money in today’s world; and seems but a heartbeat away from the one false move that will land him in irons.

The show has made no mistakes in updating Maurice Leblanc’s serial about the “Gentleman Burglar” to contemporary Paris, limiting itself to smaller series so as to better channel its creative energies into top-drawer twists and only the finest close shaves. (Season three may arrive at the ultimate in narrow escapes, involving a coffin.) It remains a gift of a show, and one of the modern era’s great adaptations: literate yet nimble, and set to run and run. 

Shane Meadows once made genial, knockabout big-screen comedies about dads and lads and blokes in chip shops, and then pivoted to making heavy-hitting state-of-the-nation addresses. A little of both, The Gallows Pole (iPlayer) forms a typically lively riff on Ben Myers’ 2017 novel about the true-life misadventures of the Cragg Vale Coiners, 18th century weavers and farmhands who, lacking two pennies to rub together, collectivised to fashion knock-off currency. Meadows’ semi-improvised style may shock to anybody expecting polished Downtonisms, but he’s tremendous on community, and how people bond over a common cause.

Between trippy glimpses of horned “stag men” (seen grooving in Bond-girl silhouette under the end credits), these three hours set the present in vibrant, funny, instructive conversation with the past. More please, BBC—even if you have to clip a few coins of your own to fund it. 

Netflix’s first-rate sports documentary shows us chess played on mountains at high velocity. This French-produced series offers a comprehensive lookback at the 2022 edition of the fabled cycling race. Within Le Tour’s overarching yellow-jersey narrative, these eight episodes locate multiple smaller stories: individual stages and battles, the competition between and within teams, the generational shifts amid a mercilessly onrushing peloton.

As viewers of ITV4’s expert daily coverage will know, this race has always provided great spectacle, but here it’s mined for multi-layered, revealing, often bruising life experience. Marvel at the altitude these cyclists ascend to over each day’s racing—and brace for impact whenever they fly over their own handlebars. 

Who deserves a Christmas bonus? Execs at Netflix France, for starters. The miniseries known across the Channel as Tapie and now streaming here as Class Act is a cherishably eccentric, rewardingly funny weighing up of a local hero: Bernard Tapie, a Trump of the Left, if such a thing is imaginable. A Duracell-bunny dreamer, Tapie (played here by Laurent Lafitte) fell into business after flopping as a folk musician, enjoyed notable footballing success as Marseille’s chairman in the Chris Waddle era, pushed back against Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fascism, and wound up behind bars anyway.

The lesson of Tapie’s life remains debatable—maybe our Gallic cousins just respond to his shrugging, buoying liberty—but the show delights in period detail and tremendous character acting: it’s something like The Crown with the ceremonial trappings replaced by cheese and sheepskin coats.