Welcome to TV in 2023
Previewing a year filled with what we hope will be a lot of triumphant returns and reinventions
Happy New Year, everybody! The first What’s Alan Watching? newsletter of 2023 coming up just as soon as I let the Big Dog off his leash…
Old business
As I alluded to when last we met, I published one story near the end of December, a review of Peacock’s docu-comedy miniseries Paul T. Goldman, which… just read the review. It’s too complicated for me to try to explain in the space of a paragraph here, and I’m still working through how I felt about that amusing, weird, deeply uncomfortable… thing.
Didn’t do much new TV watching over the break, but at least had an opportunity to finally finish Slow Horses Season Two. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I still enjoy the show a lot, but felt these new episodes were an inevitable step down from Season One. When the gimmick is “disgraced, marginalized spies surprise everyone — themselves included — by proving to still be useful at espionage,” it’s all but impossible for the balance of comedy and suspense to be perfect when the Slow Horses prove themselves yet again on a second case, and a third, etc. Definitely a less funny outing overall than the first, but still hugely likable and very well-assembled, and I’m in on this for as long as Apple, Graham Yost, and Gary Oldman want to keep making them. And speaking of Graham Yost…
New business
Yesterday, we published my list of the 2023 TV shows I find most intriguing. This is not exactly the same as the 2023 TV shows I expect to be the best. I imagine Sam Levinson and The Weeknd’s The Idol, for instance, could be deeply messy. But as with Levinson’s Euphoria, I don’t expect it to feel quite like anything else on TV, you know? The list also leans mostly towards new series, though in several cases we’ve got revivals (Party Down! Raylan Givens!) or new seasons of shows that took 2022 off (if not longer).
I’ve seen several of these already — and not necessarily just some of the January premieres, like The Last of Us and Poker Face — but embargo rules and whatnot prevent me from offering definitive opinions at this time. That said, it’s hard not to feel excited about a year in television where we will have new shows produced by Rian Johnson, Steven Soderbergh, Damon Lindelof, Steven Spielberg, and others, you know?
You should start seeing reviews, features, and even recaps of some of these over the coming weeks. In the meantime, let’s do a good old fashioned discussion prompt: what new or returning show are you most excited to see in 2023?