From Succession to The Idol: The best and worst television of 2023

Tubridy’s loss was Kielty’s gain on RTÉ, while of the streamers Netflix reasserted dominance as Disney+ floundered with anaemic efforts

Succession: Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook and Jeremy Strong in the Murdoch-adjacent dramedy. Photograph: Sky/HBO

Sat Dec 23 2023 - 05:30

The story of television in 2023 was one of drama, astonishment and disbelief. But enough, for now, about Ryan Tubridy’s exit from RTÉ.

On the global stage, the Rupert Murdoch-adjacent dramedy Succession went one better than its HBO predecessor Game of Thrones by delivering a surprise-packed and quietly moving final season – a pleasing contrast to GoT’s disastrous conclusion. Another HBO blockbuster, The Last of Us, achieved the impossible dream of giving us a decent video-game adaptation. Crawling on to schedules in January, it was a serving of zombie noir that blitzed the nerves and shredded the heartstrings.

Tubsgate aside, the true shocks came where you least expected. Blue Eye Samurai, on Netflix, was an adult cartoon with heart, soul and guts. Foundation, on Apple TV+ – partly filmed in Limerick – delivered first-rank, wonder-inducing sci-fi. In so doing it laid bare the hollowness of Disney+’s custodianship of Star Wars (the wonderful Andor excepted). Arnold Schwarzenegger even had a comeback with the silly, leave-your-brain-in-the-hallway caper Fubar.

Closer to home, when the scandal over payments to Tubridy plunged the national broadcaster into existential crisis, its original content didn’t do enough to sooth our rage. A second series of the crime drama Kin was even more ho-hum than the first. As gangland cliche piled upon cliche, it was hard not to conclude that RTÉ’s interest in scripted TV is confined to Dublin drug dealers shooting one another.

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Kin’s future was thrown into doubt after Bron Studios, its producer, filed for bankruptcy. It appeared to have received a reprieve when the BBC acquired both series of the show. Alas, Kin isn’t quite setting British telly alight. The first series is in the process of coming and going without a trace in a late-hours midweek slot. Kin’s future may not be all that sparkling.

There were a few bright spots. The ghoulish Obituary starred Siobhán Cullen as a Donegal obituary writer who progresses her career by bumping off locals. It suffered from uneven pacing and (aptly, perhaps) a moribund script. Still, it was at least an original idea rather than another rip-off of Love/Hate. Which, lest we forget, was largely a triumph of style over substance and flopped internationally.

Elsewhere, Patrick Kielty took up the baton of hosting The Late Late Show and jumped in feet first. The presenter approached the Studio 4 institution as if it were the biggest gig in broadcasting rather than a side hustle to keep him ticking over between his UK work. That commitment paid off. True, there was some quibbling about the stature of the guests. Kielty’s first Late Late was criticised for featuring straight-from-the-RTÉ-canteen interviewees such as Tommy Tiernan and the (already horribly overexposed) 2 Johnnies. Nevertheless, Kielty brought much-needed zing to an Irish television monolith. RTÉ is to be commended for approaching him for the job.

The Late Late Show: Patrick Kielty. Photograph: Andres Poveda/RTÉ

He was less frenetic than the hot-wired Tubridy, who went on to land a job at Virgin Radio in the UK. But the performance of Tubs’s career was his appearance at two Oireachtas committees in July. With the nation watching, he delivered lines such as, “Yes, the salary is enormous, I understand that, but that doesn’t affect my soul”. Decades from now, those words will end up on fridge magnets.

Television in 2023 worked hard at unpacking the complexities of modern life. Beef, on Netflix, told the story of two Los Angelenos embroiled in a destructive feud when their coping-class stress and anger bubble over. The sense that the world is gaslighting us all was caught by surrealistic comedies such as How to With John Wilson and Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, which landed like David Lynch directing Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Just as baffling – albeit by accident – was HBO’s The Idol. This creepy show about a sleazy cult leader (played by the singer the Weeknd) and a doe-eyed pop star (Lily-Rose Depp) received some of 2023’s worst reviews and represented a rare failure by HBO.

There were also some unexpected hits, such as Apple TV+’s Hijack, a mid-air romp featuring a wonderfully nervy Idris Elba as a latter-day version of John “Die Hard” McClane.

Hijack: Idris Elba. Photograph: Aidan Monaghan/Apple TV+

Also out of leftfield came Poker Face (Sky Max), a thriller dreamed up by Rian Johnson, the Glass Onion director, in homage to classic whodunits such as The Rockford Files and Murder, She Wrote. Another surprise was Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which featured the novelty casting of Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt as the same character decades apart. Their thunder was stolen, though, by stomping saurian Godzilla. Had Kielty not beaten him to it, this lounging lizard might have been in the frame for the Late Late.

In streaming, more widely, it was a time of both triumph and crisis. Netflix had a good 12 months. The company gained eight million new subscribers in the third quarter of 2023, copperfastening its position as the dominant force in the industry.

The trajectory of Disney+ was entirely different. It shed 11 million customers in the year to July, its decline hastened by anaemic new content. The Star Wars spin-off Ahsoka, for example, seemed to have been made strictly for fans of the obscure Jedi-themed cartoons Disney has pumped out in the past decade. Everyone else – even middling Wookie-watchers – will have been baffled by these new characters and their indecipherable backstories.

Sorrier yet was Secret Invasion. Though based on an iconic Marvel series, it wasted Samuel L Jackson and Emilia Clarke in a pulse-free tale of post-cold war skulduggery. It looked as if it was largely filmed in an unglamorous shopping centre in Halifax – which turned out to be the case – but nonetheless came with an eye-watering $212 million price tag. That bonkers budget further tarnished Disney’s reputation.

Beckham: a young David and Victoria. Photograph: Netflix

Documentaries had a big 2023. The most successful were made with the co-operation of their subjects – and invariably for Netflix. A four-part retelling of the life and times of David Beckham combined soap opera and sports nostalgia, though the image-conscious Beckham was careful how much of himself he put into the public domain. In a similar vein were docs about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robbie Williams, the latter featuring the singer lounging in bed for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

It has been a bumpy ride for reality TV. In November Squid Game: The Challenge, a spin-off of Netflix’s death-game drama, fared well. However, ITV was criticised for putting the Brexit buccaneer Nigel Farage front and centre of I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! As it happened, he received surprisingly little screen time, and viewers quickly fled for the hills – as did Farage’s fellow contestants Grace Dent and Jamie Lynn Spears. Both departed early for medical reasons, leaving a shrinking audience to slog on in their absence.

It hasn’t been entirely bleak. As the year wound down there was confirmation that the second series of Netflix’s Wednesday would be filmed in Ireland. That’s good news for the industry here – and for fans of Jenna Ortega’s grimdark twist on the Addams Family character. Here’s hoping that some of her success rubs off in the broader TV industry in Ireland as we accelerate into 2024.