Patrick Freyne: My favourite TV shows of 2023 so far, from murderous Barry to Succession’s squabbling brats

It’s halfway through the year and I thought I would take stock of the best TV dramas and comedies I’ve seen so far. Given the Writers Guild of America strike, to which writers have been driven by venal studios who don’t want to pay them properly, there’s a chance this might be the last batch of decent shows for a while (at least from across the ocean). So watch, or rewatch, and enjoy.

Poker Face

Now TV

When I was a child, I expected adulthood to be much more murdery and yet, ironically, to feature less angst about death. I gleaned this from watching Magnum PI in his shorts and Columbo in his mac, strutting or shuffling from crime scene to crime scene without ever losing their joie-de-vivre or their idiosyncratic personal style. Star Wars and Knives Out director Rian Johnson clearly felt the same, so he invented Poker Face, a show about a big-haired, bullshit-detecting drifter named Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) who wanders from one scene of human misery to the next with a skip in her step and a song in her heart. She often wears long jackets and shorts in a sort of Columbo/Magnum PI mash-up. Poker Face is charming, inventive and, most importantly, episodic. So, it doesn’t make you feel like you’re taking out a mortgage or starting a new relationship when you start watching it. Murders happen, Charlie solves them and moves on. All killer, no filler.

Yellowjackets

Paramount Plus

Sex and the City was the first programme to suggest there were four kinds of women and that a simple online questionnaire might determine which you most resembled. Yellowjackets, a tale of cannibalistic teens stranded in the wilderness and the middle-aged survivors reckoning with their actions two decades later, provides similarly relatable role models. Are you a Shauna (you keep accidentally killing people), a Taissa (you murder dogs in a sleep trance), a Misty (you’re keeping a private detective captive in your basement) or a Lottie (you believe the forest is talking to you and wants a sacrifice)? I’m definitely a Lottie. Yellowjackets is twisted, pulpy, 1990s-soundtracked fun.

Succession

Now TV

Jesse Armstrong’s tale of a controlling billionaire patriarch and the various offspring and courtiers vying to take over his media empire is a satisfying evisceration of empty wealth and, also, a sort of parenting guide. It made me broody for adult children I could puppeteer and manipulate (I try to do this with my terrible nephews, but they are still children and have no respect for me). Oh, to have a dolefully sarcastic fortysomething in a sensible suit stare at me with betrayal in his/her eyes. Somehow Armstrong and the writers and cast manages to make monstrous people with awful intentions seem compellingly damaged or this would have been unbearable. Instead, it’s incredibly watchable. The RTÉ board were so impressed, they recreated the scenes in which Cousin Greg is underwhelming and badly briefed at a congressional hearing for the recent Oireachtas committees.

‘I have lived so long. Why am I still here?’ Simon Cowell’s beady little eyes seem to say

---

The Full Irish Hidden Camera Show understands the craic must be baited, captured and solemnly clubbed to death

---

Is it cake? Do not show your worst child this programme! They already suspect everything is cake

---

Patrick Freyne’s favourite TV shows of 2024: An Irish national treasure, bickering hitfolk and the best actor of her generation

---

Happy Valley

BBC/RTÉ Player

Sally Wainwright explores the goldfish-bowl of small-town existence through the medium of badly planned violent crimes, local community policing and ruminations on the nature of evil. Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) is a truly original compassionate, no-nonsense heroine and ultimately the programme was all about trauma and the ways people overcome it through community and decency. There’s also a sociopathic killer and some truly awful violence, if that sounds too wholesome for you (I know what you’re like).

Somebody Somewhere

Now TV

I didn’t realise how starved I was for shows about ordinary people without superpowers, great wealth or murder until I watched the first series of this last year. It’s a bittersweet comedy drama about a middle-aged woman (Bridget Everett) washed up in her hometown due to a family tragedy, and reckoning with a sense of failure and lack of purpose. Then she befriends Joel (Jeff Hiller) and it morphs into a really heartening story about middle-aged friendship. That’s it – melancholic middle-aged high jinks. Not since Last of the Summer Wine have we seen the like.

Atlanta

Disney Plus

Donald Glover’s Atlanta began as a deceptively conventional story of black working-class Atlanta, in which college dropout Earn (Glover) manages his cousin Paper Boi’s hip-hop career. Over four series it has evolved into a show in which Glover does whatever the hell he likes. By its fourth and final series Atlanta is a barely connected collection of strange, characterful short stories, sometimes involving the main cast, sometimes not, but always circling the ways reality in the United States warps and changes depending on race and class. It’s capitalist surrealism.

Beef

Netflix

I was originally lured into this miniseries by my love of succulent meats, but it turns out Beef isn’t actually footage from a good delicatessen, but the story of two stressed motorists, played by Ali Wong and Steve Yeun, who escalate a minor road traffic incident into a mutually destructive “beef”. Wong and Yeun manage to walk a line between touchingly vulnerable and self-destructively unhinged as they maniacally eviscerate each other in sun-bleached LA. The subtext is the way in which false scarcity and economic insecurity leaves people of all classes adrift and alone in the post-industrial wasteland, but you can ignore that if you wish and just wallow in the Wile E Coyote/Road Runner madness of it all.

Barry

Now TV

A heartwarming story of a hitman, Barry (Bill Hader), who is taken under the wing of inspirational acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and begins to rethink his life of murder. Okay, it’s not that heartwarming. Barry is a mediocre actor. Gene is a petty tyrant. Barry’s lifestyle changes involve him committing even more murders (but now finding murder annoying), while somehow convincing himself that he’s still a good person. Created by Hader and Alec Berg and pitched as a comedy, Barry draws more from the history of auteur cinema than sitcom. Succession’s explorations of oligarchic power seem lighthearted by comparison. It’s visually and narratively unexpected and inventive and the way Hader and Berg navigate the tone from the cartoonishly absurd to emotionally devastating is unique. The ultimate message is, I think, that actors are terrible.

Extraordinary

Disney Plus

We’re all tired of superheroes. If Spiderperson flew up to the third floor of The Irish Times and started throwing spiders at me (or whatever Spiderperson does), I’d just say “Spiderperson, stop. I’m working”. Extraordinary, however, is a filthily funny London-based superhero yarn for which I’m able to muster genuine enthusiasm. It’s the story of hapless Jen (Máiréad Tyers) who has no superpowers, unlike everybody else in her superpower-infested universe. Siobhán McSweeney, who will hopefully be president one day, plays her mum. That’s two Cork people in one show, which is, I think, what Tom Barry was fighting for. The whole shebang was created by another talented Irish person, Emma Moran. She’s from Fermanagh, which is fine, I suppose.