Best New TV Shows of 2023: ‘The Curse’ to ‘Bupkis’

In our episodes list, I mentioned Lucky Hank, a short-lived AMC show that didn’t work in many ways, but which produced one of the year’s best hours of TV. Bupkis is sort of the inverse of that. The first episode of the show, where Pete Davidson plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself, was perhaps the single worst thing I watched this year. The rest, though, was a lot more interesting, and parts of it were genuinely terrific. Episodes could be farcical or sad, and almost all of it was much more introspective about Davidson’s public persona — and public and private struggles — than you would expect. If you haven’t seen, just skip the premiere and get to the good stuff. 

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie teamed up for the kind of singularity of discomfort you would expect from the minds behind, respectively, The Rehearsal and Uncut Gems, among other sweat-inducing past works. The result — with Fielder and Emma Stone playing a dysfunctional couple trying to get an HGTV show off the ground, and Safdie as the producer eager to upend their marriage if it will help the show — has been uneven, and at times seems to wallow in its characters’ worst moments, just because it can. But the highs — the three main performances, the sense of creeping dread, the commentary on reality TV fakery — have been high enough to mostly justify the moments where you will want to burn your television and never look at a screen for the rest of your life.   

In this alternately tense and zany romantic comedy/political thriller, Keri Russell plays a veteran State Department operative unexpectedly thrust into the job of ambassador to Great Britain, with her untrustworthy husband (Rufus Sewell, a great cad) in tow, and is dismayed to find that she’s being groomed to replace the sitting vice president. Think West Wing meets Scandal meets a Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie. The plot makes barely any sense, yet Russell is so charming and adept at the many demands of the role, and the supporting cast so good, that you have no choice but to go along with all of it.  

24 is gone, but the real-time action genre lives on! Idris Elba plays a master corporate dealmaker who has to find a way to take control when armed criminals take his transcontinental flight hostage. The plotting down on terra firma was forgettable filler, but every minute up on the plane, with Elba using his brains far more often than his brawn, was pretty riveting. 

The latest project from Sorry to Bother You writer/director Boots Riley is, at various points, a fable, a satire, a superhero origin story (Jharrel Jerome plays a 13-foot-tall Black man trying to usher in change to his native Oakland), and an anti-capitalist manifesto that happens to be paid for by one of the biggest corporations in the world. It is weird and at times confounding, but also funny and sad and unforgettable. There’s nothing else around quite like it.

Where to even begin with this one? Created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, Mrs. Davis — in which an all-powerful AI recruits a nun (Betty Gilpin) to track down the Holy Grail — at times feels less like a TV show than a series of escalating dares. Scene after scene, episode after episode, there are utterly bonkers plot twists and increasingly juvenile punchlines, each of them seeming designed to test just how much Peacock would allow Hernandez and Lindelof to get away with. Whatever the motivation, this is a rare case of craziness for its own sake working well, because the individual ideas are just that inspired, and Gilpin and co-star Jake McDorman are just that good at embracing all of the absurd things they’re asked to do, say, and react to. And by the end, you’ll be surprised by how this unapologetically stupid show will make you feel emotions that go a lot deeper than incredulity.    

Agatha Christie meets Lisbeth Salander in this locked room mystery set at a hi-tech hotel in a remote corner of Iceland, created by a shady billionaire (Andy) who has gathered some of the world’s most powerful and/or creative people together for a retreat where the guests keep dying. Emma Corrin from The Crown delivers a great star turn as the show’s hacker heroine, and if the story falters a bit by the end, the chilly atmosphere and the performances more than make up for that. 

Many of the shows on this and the other lists are extremely high-concept, with life-and-death, at times world-altering stakes. Primo, a family comedy about a San Antonio teenager being raised by his single mom and five overbearing uncles — all of them stupid in different and extremely specific ways — is the opposite of that. It’s also incredibly sweet, at times fall-off-your-chair silly, and extremely likable all around. Sometimes, small and simple can be just fine, especially when done this well.   

Most of the first episode of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off suggests this is going to be a faithful retelling of the story from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s acclaimed 2000s comics — the same plot we know from the wonderful 2010 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie, but in anime rather than live-action. That would look pretty but feel redundant quickly. Instead, the show (written by O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski) has a very different version of the story to tell, one that focuses more on Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, reprising her role from the movie, along with all of her co-stars) than on Scott (Michael Cera), that spends a lot of time with all of Ramona’s evil exes, that makes the action bigger, the genre mash-ups weirder, and the whole thing even more ridiculous. Oh, and the animation looks fantastic. 

Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence stepped away from that show’s final season, instead focusing on this comedy, co-created by Brett Goldstein and star Jason Segel, about a psychiatrist (Segel) whose life is falling apart in the aftermath of his wife’s death. Lawrence wound up working on the much better season of TV, especially once Shrinking started evolving past its iffy “What if a therapist started getting directly involved in his patient’s lives?” premise and turned into a hangout comedy with a wonderful, winning ensemble that included Harrison Ford (enjoying the best new role of his career in forever), Jessica Williams, Christa Miller, and more.