IN THE waning days of 2022, with little to do but gorge on Christmas leftovers, I find myself thinking about the coming year. Because sincere self-reflection is beyond me, however, all those thoughts concern television – and so I have amassed a non-exhaustive list of the nine shows I am most looking forward to in 2023.
If any TV series gives me hope for the medium’s future, it is , an unsettling workplace dramedy that debuted on Apple TV+ in February. We followed Mark Scout (Adam Scott pictured above) and his colleagues at Lumon Industries, who had agreed to have their memories of work surgically separated from the rest of their lives. Filming is under way, so we are likely to be blessed with more Severance in 2023.
I am limiting the Disney+ franchise juggernauts of Marvel and Star Wars to one pick each. Season two of , set to air in mid-2023, is the most promising of the Marvel bunch thanks to its intriguing Time Variance Authority, which monitors the multiverse and can prune timelines if they are deemed too dangerous to exist. Indie film-makers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are set to direct most of the season, and their trippy, offbeat visuals are a perfect fit for a trickster god like Loki Laufeyson.
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As for the Star Wars universe, I am eagerly awaiting the return of and its heroes, bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and pointy-eared alien Grogu. When we last saw Din, his surrogacy of Grogu had estranged him from his fellow Mandalorians. Will the pair survive alone against the forces of the Empire? Find out from 1 March.
To my delight, Pascal will also be back on screen with , (pictured above) airing on 15 January on Sky Atlantic and Now. Adapted from the best-selling video game of the same name, it is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a fungal pandemic has turned most of humanity into zombie-like monsters. Joel (Pascal) is a smuggler tasked with escorting teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a ruined US. The original game is a shattering tale of grief and sacrifice, and I hope the series lives up to its bleak beauty.
The Last of Us isn’t the only video game adaptation on the roster. A far jauntier apocalypse awaits in , in which survivors of nuclear war emerge from underground vaults into a 1950s-flavoured wasteland. While there is no official date yet, this Amazon Prime Video series has been shooting since mid-2022 and will probably air before the end of 2023. For a completely different take on subterranean survival after a global disaster, try Wool, an Apple TV+ series based on Hugh Howey’s Silo books. It is rumoured to hit screens in March.
Other novels being adapted this year include Bonnie Garmus’s . Due to air on Apple TV+ at some point this year, this comedy, set in the mid-20th century, sees Brie Larson play Elizabeth Zott, a chemist turned TV cook who leverages her platform to teach science to suburban women. It will be a heady aperitif to a much-anticipated adaptation of , a modern sci-fi classic written by Cixin Liu and brought to Netflix by former Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. At once a tale of first contact with an advanced alien species and a meditation on China’s Cultural Revolution, it will be a mighty task to capture the work’s complexity.
Finally, – a long-awaited climate drama made by Scott Z. Burns, the producer of An Inconvenient Truth – airs on Apple TV+ in 2023. The series explores how climate change will touch every aspect of our lives, from love and family to work and faith. This star-studded production (Meryl Streep and Forest Whitaker are two of the big names in it) is sure to be one of the biggest shows of the year. Let’s hope its climate message lives up to its cast.
