The Best of TV in 2023

I don’t always recap the TV shows I’ve watched over the year, but when I do, it’s because I watched something particularly great, or a number of great shows. A couple of the older shows I watched for the first time in 2023 included Euphoria season one and the first three seasons of Gilmore Girls, and I was about halfway through my umpteenth time re-watching Friends when Matthew Perry passed away. I’m going to focus on the new shows from the past year and go through them in the order I watched them.

 

The Last of Us

Every time this show comes up lately there’s this moment of realization that it came out this year, but it came out so early it feels like longer ago. There was a lot of hype surrounding HBO’s adaptation of the hit video game, and it not only lived up to the hype, it ended up being what I think is unarguably the best adaptation of a video game made up to this point. It is leaps and bounds beyond the best video game movies (a short list), with excellent writing, acting, and high production value. I really appreciated that it didn’t just feel like HBO’s solution to The Walking Dead—The Last of Us is its own thing, with a new take on the tired zombie subgenre that really worked for me. I hope the second season can live up to the first, but even if it can’t, the first season will stand on its own as a very special show for years to come. 

 

You

I had only seen the first episode of this Netflix mystery-drama back in 2021 and then never continued with it, but prior to the new season dropping I watched every episode, and the first season ended up being a pretty suspenseful story from the point of view of a compelling unreliable narrator, but with the way it ended I was quite intrigued for season two, which I think was even better in several ways and didn’t go in the direction I expected the story to take. Season three was not quite as good, but still entertaining enough that I wanted to see how it would all go down at the end, and then season four started…The show should have ended after three seasons. It became too farfetched and too uninspired for me to care about the main character anymore or the lackluster storyline he had fallen into. I barely got through half of season four, and don’t anticipate finishing it.

 

Succession

The HBO satirical drama Succession is the best TV show from beginning to end that I have seen since Breaking Bad, and that is the highest praise I can give it. Breaking Bad remains my personal benchmark for the most compelling long-form narrative I’ve seen, never dipping in quality and constantly building up the characters to be more interesting and the story to be more dramatic until reaching a wholly satisfying conclusion. Succession managed to do the same thing, never declining in quality over the course of four seasons and ending with a wholly satisfying and unexpected finale. I don’t want my comparative praise of Succession to be misconstrued, though, because even though it’s the best show I’ve seen overall since Breaking Bad, the shows aren’t really that comparable. Succession is politically charged, over-the-top in all the right ways, and hilarious in very specific ways. It’s a show I will be thinking about for a long time, and I would not hesitate to watch it all again from beginning to end.

 

The Bear

Just when I thought it couldn’t get better than Succession, along came FX’s The Bear. If you don’t know it, no, it’s not about the animal. It’s the story of a chef in Chicago working to revive a restaurant that belonged to his late brother, and it started off instantly compelling, only growing more so as it became more stressful and more was revealed about the characters. The first season was incredible, and the second season that dropped this summer was even better. The hour-long episode “Fishes” which steps into the past for a Christmas family dinner is one of the most intense episodes of TV I’ve seen in years. The casting for The Bear is so good I feel like I’m watching real people, and I really appreciate how the show can be whatever it needs to be for each episode in terms of length and pacing. Most are around a half hour, but there’s one episode in season one that’s less than twenty minutes, and the aforementioned “Fishes” episode is over an hour. I hope season three can maintain the quality and heights of intensity the first two seasons have managed to reach.

 

Skull Island

I already reviewed the first season of this anime-style show set in the MonsterVerse, so I’ll include the link here. It was a decent show that probably won’t win over anyone who isn’t already a King Kong fan or locked in to the MonsterVerse movies/shows, but I found it quite enjoyable.

Review: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2023/07/skull-island-season-1-review.html

 

Arnold

The Netflix miniseries documentary that dropped in the summer about the body builder turned actor turned politician whose voice everyone loves to poorly imitate was a pretty comprehensive overview of the life of this iconic individual. Personally, I wish a bit more time had been spent on episode two, which focused on his career as an actor, but I get that time had to be spent on his early life, which I found very interesting, and his post-movie-star political career, which I did not find as interesting. It was quite a revealing documentary, though ultimately not loaded with all that much incredible new information, and clearly designed to uphold the best image of Arnold possible in spite of some of the not-so-great things he’s done. If you’re at all interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger in any capacity, I think it’s worth watching.

 

Five Star Chef

When I was a really young kid I used to watch cooking shows here and there, but not until the past year had I really sat down and closely watched any. It’s a genre of TV my girlfriend enjoys, so it’s often something that’s just on now, and I’ve been casually watching shows like Top Chef and Masterchef this past year. In 2022 I quite enjoyed Iron Chef: Quest For an Iron Legend and Drink Masters on Netflix, but this year the new Netflix cooking show was Five Star Chef. A few of the contestants were annoying, and the host was also a bit annoying at times, but the premise of the show was a little different than some of those other shows I mentioned, which I appreciated, and the dishes the contestants cooked were creative and interesting. Overall it wasn’t as good as Iron Chef, but still good enough that I watched it all the way through.

 

GAMERA – Rebirth

Just like with Skull Island, I already reviewed this giant monster anime, so here is the link. Compared to Skull Island, Gamera felt like a more authentic anime viewing experience, which isn’t surprising since it was actually made in Japan, and as a reboot to the long dormant Gamera series, it was pretty great.

Review: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2023/11/gamera-rebirth-anime-series-review.html

 

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Back in my Godzilla Minus One review I said 2023 will go down in history as one of the best years for the Godzilla franchise. This show is the other half of the reason why. Godzilla Minus One was one of the best character-driven Godzilla movies to come out of Japan, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is the best human-driven Godzilla story by an American production company. Hollywood has had success as of late in creating financially successful Godzilla movies with fun monster action, but the human stories have not been that great. Monarch seemed like it would be a Godzilla adjacent show at most, filling in some of the blanks on the edges of the stories told in Godzilla 2014 and Kong: Skull Island, but the show has proven to be so much more than that. It is a compelling prequel and sequel to Godzilla 2014, exploring the secretive government organization Monarch and the people behind it in a way that actually justifies being told episodically. The nonlinear narrative jumping back and forth through time works surprisingly well, and the focus on the characters works in a way that has not worked in the MonsterVerse movies thus far. It’s not perfect, not all the characters are great, and some of the story points are a little questionable, but the visual effects are on par with the films, and the amount of Godzilla and other monsters has been surprisingly satisfying, too. As of writing this the season has not concluded, but it’s over halfway through, and it is one of the most entertaining and most satisfying entries in the growing MonsterVerse so far.