Spoilt for television viewing choice in 2023
There is a feast of brilliant television to look forward to – both new shows and new series of old favourites.
This time last year, it was as if the television narrative for the next 12 months was already laid out before us. Going into 2022, we knew that the small screen would be locked in a battle between House of the Dragon and Rings of Power, a fight between one global streaming behemoth and another, both pouring considerable resources into fantasy projects for sizeable fandoms. We were right: both productions were massive television events, watched by hundreds of millions of people – a hundred million tuned in for Rings of Power, per Prime Video, while some 10 million settled in for House of the Dragon every episode – and generating social media buzz more akin to a swarm.
By comparison, 2023 is looking a little quieter. There will be a new series of Succession, coming sometime in the first half of the year and sure to be appointment viewing, as for every previous season of the show. There will be more And Just Like That, more Loki and The Mandalorian, more Bridgerton, The Crown and more Yellowjackets. Very exciting, but it does feel as if there is a small screen gap waiting to be filled right now.
All this to say, we probably haven’t heard of the best show of 2023 yet. In recent years, the standout small screen successes have all been word-of-mouth hits that came out of nowhere, which is part of their charm. We’re talking about the dominance of the first season of Squid Game, the addictiveness of Yellowjackets, or the way White Lotus crept up on everyone and hooked us with its particular brand of nastiness meets travel porn.
Who is going to be our next Duke of Hastings? What is going to be our next Selling Sunset? What is going to make us yell ‘Yes Chef’ at the television, as we did after watching The Bear? When are we going to feel anything on par with the reaction when Roman sent an explicit image of his genitals to his father in the penultimate episode of Succession last season?
Movies might come and go from cinemas at an alarming rate, but television is forever. And a whole new year of binge-watching is just around the corner. Isn’t that exciting?
Foxtel
Coming soon to a television near you: the much-anticipated fourth season of Succession. That’s right, the Roys are back in town, and not a moment too soon. Season three of the high octane drama, about a media dynasty squabbling over the family inheritance – King Lear with Twitter, basically – won Outstanding Drama Series at the 2022 Emmys.
The fourth season is slated to arrive on Foxtel in early 2023 at a date tantalisingly yet unknown. But a teaser trailer has been released, in which the three Roy children Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are licking their wounds following their disastrous attempt at a company takeover in last season’s finale.
Against all odds, Shiv’s unlikely husband Tom (Matthew MacFadyen) has risen to the top of the family power pool. Their marriage has survived arguments, affairs and the suggestion of potentially going open. But can it survive boardroom backstabbing?
Binge
A huge year is coming for Binge, and it starts this month with The Last Of Us, a blockbuster adaptation of one of the world’s most popular video games, set in a post-apocalyptic world in which an unlikely pair must battle their way through a brutal world. Later in the year will see the premiere of the next season of And Just Like That, picking up where the Sex and the City reboot left off last year, along with The Idol, a sizzling new series from Euphoria creator Sam Levinson and music superstar The Weekend. Lily-Rose Depp and Troye Sivan co-star.
Locally, Binge will release the second season of its beloved original drama Love Me, starring Bojana Novakovic, Hugo Weaving and Heather Mitchell, who picked up a Silver Logie award for her performance last year. Strife, a new series from The Letdown screenwriter Sarah Scheller, follows Asher Keddie as journalist Evelyn Jones, as she makes the transition from blogger to media magnate, in a story inspired by Mia Freedman’s memoir Work, Strife, Balance.
AppleTV+
Since its launch in 2019: AppleTV+ has curated a high quality service, even nabbing top awards for its content: an Oscar for CODA; Emmys galore for Ted Lasso, its most beloved series, that will return for a third season in 2023. This jewel in the platform’s crown follows Jason Sudeikis’ clueless but charming football manager hoping to usher an underdog team to glory. Feels like a metaphor for something.
Enough about returning favourites: this year will see an explosion of new series on AppleTV+. First up is Shrinking, a comedy about therapy from the creators of Ted Lasso with an all-star cast including Jason Segel and Harrison Ford. It appears to be following the Lasso formula: make ‘em laugh, but also make ‘em cry. Brie Larson will star in the adaptation of the best-selling novel Lessons in Chemistry, about a scientist in the ‘50s who becomes an unlikely television cooking sensation.
From Reese Witherspoon’s production company comes The Last Thing He Told Me, a thriller about a woman searching for her missing husband aided only by her teenage stepdaughter Bailey. Australian Angourie Rice and Jennifer Garner play the mystery-solving duo. And speaking of thrillers, we can’t wait for Hijack, led by Idris Elba as a business negotiator brought in to save a hijacked plane. The show has been written by George Kay, who is the writer on Lupin, and also stars The Good Wife’s brilliant Archie Panjabi.
But our most anticipated from AppleTV+’s slate is Masters of the Air, a series from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and starring Austin Butler – Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis – as a fighter pilot during Word War II. The series is part of Spielberg and Hanks’s Band of Brothers trilogy, which launched the careers of everyone from Tom Hardy to James McAvoy. After Elvis, Butler needs no introduction, but with him at the helm this series is going to have a lot of eyes on it.
Alongside Masters of Air, Apple is leaning heavily into the period epic genre: 2023 will also see them premiere Manhunt, a Tobias Menzies led drama about the aftermath of the Lincoln Assassination and The Big Cigar, a series set in Cuba and following Black Panther leader Huey P Newton’s escape from America, with Moonlight’s Andre Holland in the lead role.
Netflix
The ton is abuzz with the news that not one but two Bridgerton series will stream on Netflix in the new year. The much-anticipated third season, with action focused on Nicola Coughlan’s Lady Penelope character, will drop sometime soon, and hot on its heels will be a Queen Charlotte prequel, starring India Armateifio as the young woman who would become the arbiter of all society.
Expect an enemies-to-lovers story not dissimilar to season one of Bridgerton, where Daphne and the Duke learnt to love each other after an early chilliness to their courtship. Everything Bridgerton touches turns to streaming gold – 193 million hours were watched in the first weekend of the second season’s premiere alone – so you can expect both of these series to dominate conversations when they land on Netflix in the new year.
As for the rest of the slate, there are several cult favourites returning for new seasons. The psychodrama You starring Penn Badgley will be back for a fourth season, set in the UK and just as deliciously deranged. A second seasons of Shadow and Boneand of Squid Game, one a high fantasy quest series and the other a thrilling – and super violent – K-drama that become Netflix’s most popular series ever made, will both drop in the new year.
A third season of beloved French series Lupin, starring Omar Sy as a gentleman thief who constantly outsmarts his adversaries, is also in the offing, along with the sixth and final season of The Crown. Currently in production, this show will cover the tragic death of Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) and is rumoured to end with the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Netflix has cast young stars Ed McVey and Meg Bellamy in these two crucial roles, joining returning stars Dominic West as Prince Charles and Imelda Staunton as the Queen.
Prime Video
This year will see the first major suite of Prime Video’s Australian drama begins to hit the platform. This includes Deadloch, a very clever noir in the vein of recent small screen favourite Bad Sisters, in which a pair of female detectives are dispatched to a picture perfect Tasmanian town to solve a brutal murder. Part workplace comedy and part addictive mystery, Deadloch draws on a pool of fantastic local talent, with direction from Gracie Otto and scripts by the Kates McCartney and McLennan.
Class of 07, a Yellowjackets-esque dark comedy about an apocalyptic event that coincides with a dreaded school reunion, is another jewel this year. The cast includes Emily Browning, Caitlin Stasey and Julia Savage.
But Prime Video’s biggest gamble – and splashiest production yet – is its local drama The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, produced by Bruna Papandrea of Big Little Lies fame and based on the best-selling novel by Holly Ringland. The story is engrossing: secrets within secrets as a young woman learns the truth about her parents’ mysterious deaths and the family trauma that has been hidden away for generations, and buzz around the production is high. Sigourney Weaver stars alongside a fantastic local ensemble led by Asher Keddie, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Tilda Cobham-Hervey and Leah Purcell.
Globally, one of Prime Video’s most exciting series is the adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones and the Six, coming to the platform in March. Riley Keough stars as Daisy Jones in this series, which chronicles the disintegration of a chart-topping band. (Think: Fleetwood Mac.) Jenkins Reid is a novelist whose storytelling is on par with Liane Moriarty, so think of this as a similarly compelling Big Little Lies-esque ensemble piece. Keough’s co-stars include Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse and Timothy Olyphant.
Stan
Local drama has a home at Stan, which will unveil a number of new series in 2023. The most exciting is Ten Pound Poms, a co-production with the BBC set in ‘50s-era Sydney and following a group of young English immigrants to Sydney. Stan’s previous co-production with the BBC, the Jamie Dornan-starring The Tourist, was a huge success both locally and abroad, and this period drama comes with high hopes. Also exciting is a star-studded series called C*A*U*G*H*T, which was executive produced (and stars) Sean Penn alongside Matthew Fox, Kick Gurry and Lincoln Younes in a tale of four Australian soldiers on a global mission gone wrong.
Then there’s Bad Behaviour, a Lord of the Flies-esque series about the nastiness of teenage girls which will be led by Markella Kavenagh, the breakout star of Prime Video’s Rings of Power reboot. The series is based on a memoir about the shocking reality of life at the remote campus of an exclusive all girls school.
And following that will be Totally Completely Fine, a vehicle for rising star Thomasin McKenzie, and a new entrant in the ‘Hot Mess’ genre of miniseries. (See also: Fleabag, High Fidelity and Russian Doll). McKenzie plays Vivian, a 20-something who has just burned down her brother’s food truck with her vape, and as penance must run a coastal retreat for fellow chaos agents on the edge.
Paramount+
Paramount+ is the home of a surprising amount of the new television coming this year, such as Ripley, the much-anticipated adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley, starring Andrew Scott, Dakota Fanning and Johnny Flynn, or Three Women, from author Lisa Taddeo and led by Shailene Woodley and DeWanda Wise. Locally, Paramount+ is also amping up its production, with new series including the John Ibrahim drama Last King of the Cross starring Callan Mulvey and Lincoln Younes.
Disney+
Locally, Disney+ has been amping up its original content, including a Sydney-set Oliver Twist reboot and a true crime series called The Clearing, set in a cult and starring Teresa Palmer, slated for release this year. There are also a few returning favourites from Disney’s A-list global franchises to get excited about, including a second season for beloved Tom Hiddleston sci-fi drama Loki, and a third season of the Emmy-nominated The Mandalorian.
New from the Star Wars world is Ahsoka, an origin story led by Rosario Dawson and co-starring Australian rising talent Natasha Liu-Bordizzo. In the world of Marvel television, there’ll be the long awaited Secret Invasionseries, which has nabbed a massive name to headline its story: Olivia Colman. The Oscar-winner will play an agent called Sonya Falsworth in Secret Invasion, but she isn’t the only big star anchoring the project. Emilia Clarke is also a lead, alongside Samuel L Jackson and Kingsley Ben-Adir. In the middle of the year, keep your eyes peeled for Echo. Fans of 2022’s charming Ms Marvel show will no doubt fall for this origin story, which follows Native American hero Echo (Alacqua Cox), who made her first appearance in Marvel’s Hawkeye series, and is sure to be a major player in the franchise going forward.