Could 2023 be the greatest ever year of TV?

From several exciting page-to-screen adaptations to the new seasons of The White Lotus and Succession, the year ahead promises diversity and delight in streaming land.

Jamie Dornan in The Tourist is among a crop of highly anticipated streaming events in 2023.. Picture: Ian Routledge

Last year’s TV was simply exhausting. There was an avalanche of exciting new shows. There have been so many pleasures to be enjoyed in watching such increasingly complicated and diverse creative activity in this era of extreme media convergence.

Who could have imagined the streaming revolution, a raucous army of new shows of every generic possibility constantly, seamlessly, flooding our screens? So many of these shows have had such complex meanings, presenting a sometimes bewilderingly cultural perspective to those of us who still recall our skylines starting to change as hundreds of metal poles with branches and spokes in all directions started to spring up on the rooftops.

In the coming year there’s so much to look forward to in the boundless options that already seem overwhelming. So here’s a rough summary of what has so far caught this watcher’s eye, the big hitters for 2023.

Peaky Blinders and SAS: Rogue Heroes creator Steven Knight is back with This Town for the BBC. It is described as the story of an extended family and four young people who are drawn into the world of ska and two-tone music, which exploded from the grassroots of Coventry and Birmingham in the late 1970s and early 80s, uniting black, white and Asian youths.

British actor Michelle Dockery, of Downton Abbey fame, stars in the BBC’s upcoming project This Town.

Line of Duty star Martin Compston joins Ashley Jensen (our favourite Scottish actress) and Tony Curran in a BBC drama called Mayflies, adapted from Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed novel of the same name. Like the book, we’re told the series examines the nature of class, friendship, life, love, loss and the impact, persistence and strength of the earlier bonds between a couple of rowdy Scottish teenagers.

I also like the sound of Ten Pound Poms, a co-production between the BBC and Stan, which follows a group of Brits as they leave dreary post-war Britain in 1956 to embark on a life-altering adventure on the other side of the world as outsiders in a new land. For only a tenner, they have been promised a better house, better job prospects and a better quality of life by the sea in sun-soaked Australia. But life down under ain’t no idyllic dream for many.

Boiling Point is a five-part series based on the highly successful movie of the same title, somewhat sensationally filmed in one take. Chefs generally loathed it – too cliched – but audiences lapped it up. Stephen Graham returns but the BBC series centres on sous chef Carly (Vinette Robinson) as head chef at her own restaurant, and we are promised “food will fly and tears will fall”.

Jamie Dornan returns as “The Man” in the second season of BBC One and HBO’s dark comedy mystery The Tourist from The Missing writers Jack and Harry Williams, those masters of legerdemain when it comes to thrillers. The series is set Down Under and followed Dornan’s enigmatic character as he recovered from a car accident seemingly with no sense of identity.

Fans will be delighted that both political thriller Vigil starring Suranne Jones and Martin Freeman’s crime series The Responder have been renewed for a second season. (I just hope The Responder is a little easier to understand, its use of dialect made it almost unwatchable.)

Guy Ritchie is on board to produce a Netflix series’ adaptation of his 2019 film The Gentlemen, which starred Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, and Colin Farrell. At the heart of the series we’re told is Eddie Halstead, played by White Lotus’s Theo James, newly appointed heir to a prominent English estate. Instead of basking in his late father’s wealth, Halstead quickly learns that his new home is a large marijuana farm. Expect all of the usual Ritchie underworld capers and thriller shenanigans.

Talented and rather zany, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi are working on a TV adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy adventure cult classic Time Bandits for Apple TV. Like the movie, it’s intimated the show will revolve around a ragtag band of outlaws who embark on a daring journey through time and space. And, like Gilliam’s legendary flick, their newest recruit happens to be an 11-year-old history buff.

Jeff Daniels, such a versatile and accomplished actor, stars in Netflix’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full with Oscar-winner Regina King directing and David E. Kelley, of Ally McBeal and Boston Legal distinction, writing and producing. Up until now Kelley had been one of the victims of the cable-led revolution, his talk-driven style seemingly a tad old fashioned, but in the days of the streamer revolution he’s everywhere.

Netflix also has the adaptation of Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, written by John Collee (Master and Commander, Hotel Mumbai), the story of a working-class Brisbane teenager navigating the world of drug addiction, ex-cons and prison escapes, and violence in suburban Brisbane in the 1980s. Some of the episodes will be directed by Emmy-nominee Bharat Nalluri (Shantaram). Netflix says the production “is a major milestone in our mission to unearth uniquely local stories that bring joy and connection in unexpected ways to our audiences here at home, and throughout the world.” Dalton said when he heard the news of the commission, “that sound you hear is my heart exploding. Internal fireworks popping and flashing in pinks and purples and golds.”

The Western is still with us, and all guns blazing, Netflix joins in the mayhem in the wilderness with The Abandons from Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy and Mayans M.C. It’s set in the 1850s and follows a group of families, somewhere between the Dakotas and California trying to preserve their land pre-Gold rush, pre-Civil War. Walking that fine line between justice and the law, they live in a world with “the outliers, the orphans, the prostitutes, the cripples, the bastards – basically the kind of lost souls living on the fringe of society,” says Sutter. “That is my favourite neighbourhood.” Sutter also has the movie This Beast with Netflix, apparently about a trapper’s battle with an elusive creature ravaging an 18th-century English village.

The Fall of the House of Usher looks tantalising too. It is one of the numerous Netflix projects coming from Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House), who has a way with horror, and is based on multiple works by Edgar Allan Poe. It is described as featuring “themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities”. Poe’s stories are some of the most influential ever written, and he is widely revered and credited with inventing the detective genre.

Less ghoulish but hopefully just as full of generic pleasures is Shawn Ryan’s The Night Agent, the new thriller adaptation based on the novel by Matthew Quirk. All we know so far is that it follows a low-level FBI agent, Peter Sutherland, “who works in the basement of the White House, manning a phone that never rings until the night it does, propelling him into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Oval Office”. It might sound a bit conventional to hard-boiled thriller aficionados but remember Ryan invented The Shield, which featured a hard-drinking, alienated, borderline sociopathic cop who throws away the book in order to maintain order.

Fans will be delighted that HBO’s True Detective is coming back after three long years, currently titled True Detective: Night Country, and stars Jodie Foster as Detective Liz Danvers, who is also executive producer. All we know is that it is set in Alaska where six men operating an arctic research station disappear without a trace. HBO says, “To solve the case, Liz teams up with Detective Evangeline Navarro and together, they will have to confront the darkness they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.” Navarro will be played by Kali Reis, who is not only an accomplished actor but also happens to be a world champion boxer.

Jodie Foster stars in the new season of True Detective.

Fans too will be pleased that Mathew Rhys also returns with the second season of Perry Mason, the show set in early 1930s Los Angeles, a city quickly growing from a backwater to a full-on metropolis. And unlike Raymond Burr’s earlier TV version, Rhys’s Mason is straight out of the pulps, the popular crime magazines that nurtured Mason’s creator Erle Stanley Gardner at the start of his career in the 1930s. This PI is bitter, pugnacious, marginal and lonely.

Also intriguing is just what Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of hit musical A Chorus Line will look like when it finally appears sometime, it seems, through the year. It appears Murphy is planning going in what has been called “a meta-theatrical/meta-filmic/biopic direction”. This seems to involve the use of tapes and interviews with the show’s original director Michael Bennett, “my favourite Broadway director of all time”, according to Murphy. “So, it’s going to be A Chorus Line with all that wonderful music, but also the idea of how did he make A Chorus Line?”

So there’s a couple of the standout events for next year but undeniably the heaviest hitters will be the fourth season of Succession and the third season of The White Lotus.

Mike White’s hottest show of this year is possibly destined for the gorgeous hotels in the Maldives according to hints from the creator. “The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” he said recently. “I think the third season would be maybe a satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus.”

Oh yes, what a year is in store.