20. Captains of the World (Netflix)Why make one 90-minute official World Cup 2022 film when you can make a six-part, five-hour series, apparently drawing on every last scrap of footage in the known universe? Very much "in association with FIFA+": the phrase "human rights" is uttered just once, in association with a Danish team whose early exit is (perhaps unintentionally) linked with keeping too close an eye on off-the-pitch events. The compensation is vast reserves of human interest. The Turners are too experienced and too sly to fumble the spectacle this tournament dropped squarely in their laps, and the stories they sought out on the touchlines - making good on the unprecedented access this project afforded them to football's big shots - are scarcely less stirring. (They explain the mythos of Messi more economically than anyone has - often by images alone.) A fascinating formal development: digital shooting means documentary crews can apparently now afford to spend entire matches tracking a Messi or Mbappé around the pitch, regardless of the effect they have on the game in hand; it's as if Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait has burst out of the gallery to take up permanent-ish residence in your front room. Sport - and football in particular - remains the best metaphor we've got for the daily wins and losses of this world (stray thought: did the irrational fervour of Argentina's victory lead to Milei, in the same way the irrational fervour of London 2012 factored into Brexit?); the parallels are evoked here with such abundant love for the game - and in such an all-encompassing, all-embracing manner - that you may even come away with some small measure of sympathy for Cristiano Ronaldo. Almost. Possibly. Maybe. Look, I said small.
19. The Change S1 (Channel 4)
Bridget Christie’s six-part comedy aired amid a season devoted to the under-dramatised topic of the menopause, and part of its project was educational. Much as Christie’s flushing heroine Linda flees her family home with vague hopes of teaching her clueless husband a lesson, so too the show conveyed considerable insider knowledge on the turbulence facing women navigating middle age. Men will enter the woodland sanctuary Linda beds into bemused; they should emerge amused and enlightened. Yet with its ear for folky laments and eye for arcane ritual, The Change develops into something far stranger and more enchanting than a televised biology class. Merrily broaching a subject from which other creatives have shied away in terror, it’s finally a celebration of change in all its forms.
18. Colin from Accounts S1 (BBC2; iPlayer)
...which I raved about for Variety here.
17. Trial by Fire (Netflix)
...which I also championed for Variety, and you can find that here.
16. Class Act/Tapie (Netflix)
Odd, funny, supremely watchable weighing up of a now almost entirely unimaginable figure: a Trump of the Left, a Duracell-bunny dreamer who went into business (from folk music!) seemingly with the express intent of - get this - improving things, clapped back against Le Pen's fascism, got drunk on power anyway, and still wound up behind bars. Thoughtfully constructed, each episode is its own diversification, some of which actually pay off financially, and the narrative throughline is bejewelled with events just distant enough in time to retain some element of surprise. It's anchored by versatile work from Laurent Lafitte De La Comédie-Française, essaying the Seven Ages of Tapie with tremendous brio; and while there's not finally enough Avec La Participation Exceptionelle De Fabrice Luchini (there rarely is), it's a feast of French character acting elsewhere. Special commendations for the dude playing the Mayor of Marseille (a droller Michael Caine), the prosecutor who finally brings Tapie down (a judicial Tweety Pie, slyly outmanoeuvring his artless foe) and the hair and make-up team for precision recreation of Rudi Völler's thinning moustache-and-mullet combo of 1993.
15. Taskmaster S15 (Channel 4)
We don't talk about S16 in this household, but one of its issues was surely that it was following one of the all-time great Taskmaster line-ups: Boyle, Graham, Eclair, Smith-Bynoe and Martin, folks who tessellated in fresh and funny ways week in week out.
14. Hijack S1 (Apple TV+)
Revives the best idea 24 ever had – telly in quasi-real time, tracking the turbulence aboard a seven-hour Dubai-London flight – while updating the look and logbooks of the 1970s disaster movie. Overseen by seasoned pros George Kay and Jim Field Smith (who between them have run Lupin and the UK arm of Netflix’s smart, underrated interview-room drama Criminal), the central standoff cues highly pressurised games of strategy, as Idris Elba’s “business negotiator” reasons midair with gun-toting disruptor Neil Maskell and a richly characterised roster of hostages. It’s surprising how rarely anyone needs the loo, but the suspense is well-marshalled and elevated by an exceptionally precise use of cabin space. We always know who’s where, even if twisty scripting means we’re less certain what everybody’s up to – save Elba, calmly underlining his status as among our most dependable small-screen stars.
13. Lupin S3 (Netflix)
Speaking of which... One of the smartest decisions Kay and his team made in hauling Maurice Leblanc into the 21st century: limiting themselves to smaller series runs so as to better channel their creative energies into top-drawer twists and only the finest close shaves. (Season 3 may arrive at the ultimate in narrow escapes, involving a coffin.) It remains a gift of a show, and one of the modern era’s great adaptations: literate yet nimble, and set to run and run, with any luck.
12. Poison (Netflix)
"One might creep discreetly through the gap beneath a small child's bedroom door." Roald Dahl, you cruel bastard. An absolute gift of a set-up for any short film, here given renewed impetus by Dev Patel, the best fast actor we have, and finished off in a ruthless manner that may actually be the single most impressive aspect of the entire your-man-does-Dahl side project. Certainly, these four shorts stood as my favourite Wes Anderson project of 2023, not least for suggesting how this house style might also accommodate elements of horror, thriller, mystery and social comment. Why, then, does he persist with whimsy? (See also: #9 on this list.)
11. Slow Horses S3 (Apple TV+)
How good is Slow Horses? This good: the plot of the hit spy show’s third series – torn from Mick Herron’s “Real Tigers” – is almost as dishevelled as Gary Oldman’s dissolute spymaster Jackson Lamb, an altogether rickety affair involving conspiracy theories, private security forces, internal MI5 power struggles and the shortest-lived guest star in recent TV history. It barely matters, so long as showrunner Will Smith (the stand-up turned Veep writer, not the disgraced Oscar-winner) sustains the cherishably, often pricelessly tetchy interactions between series regulars; indeed, this may now be the most characterful show around, funny in a dry, distinctively British way. (On being ambushed, one agent moans “I wish we’d stayed in the pub.”) First among equals: Oldman himself, having visible fun not just with the role, but with each fart and cigarette and every withering insult. Joyous.
10. No Activity S1/2 (BBC2; iPlayer)
An earlier work by Team Colin from Accounts, likely conceived as a send-up of The Wire, and drily observing detectives and police back-up staff as they talk the nonsense that doubtless gets actual lawmakers through their duller stakeouts. It’s often hilarious nonsense, though, and somehow doesn’t preclude character development or gratifying plotting. (The Nick Miller hive might also want to investigate.)
9. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix)
39 minutes that, at long last, got Wes Anderson back in my good books. (It is a wonderful, transporting, genuinely imaginative story, however much anyone might fuss over and fiddle with it.) Do all Anderson's post-Rushmore films get funny when played at double speed? Is that the way to banish the airlessness and inertia that has set in elsewhere of late? Might it not be in everyone's best interests if this director carried on adapting short stories as if he were making deluxe pop videos?
8. We Need to Talk About Cosby (BBC2; iPlayer)
October's The Reckoning got all the media coverage, but this was the better example of television wrestling with itself. Over four hourlong parts, comedian and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell discusses the tarnished legacy of Bill Cosby with colleagues, academics, and those in Cosby’s orbit. Some methodically unpick the art from the artist; others highlight moments in the stand-up and sitcoms where the mask seemed to slip, and question why nobody cared to notice. Crucially, the survivors introduce their own testimony. If Bell’s show prompts extremely mixed emotions, well, that’s likely the point: Cosby brought joy to millions, while causing intolerable – indeed, belatedly actionable – pain to hundreds more. There’s much to talk about.
7. Still Up S1 (Apple TV+)
The best romantic comedy for some while, blessed as it was with a great hook: two insomniacs, connecting via telephone in the wee small hours. They’d be made for one another, were it not that journalist Danny (Craig Roberts) is an agoraphobic recluse, and his potential BFF Lisa (Antonia Thomas) is already partnered up. Each of the show’s eight episodes is an extended conversation, showcasing superior writing and playing. Lisa talks Danny through a date; Danny redirects Lisa across London after a drunken night out. In the home stretch, you realise how deeply these characters have got under your skin, and how close they are to your heart – but that’s what happens when you stay up past bedtime with folks you care about.
6. Fargo S5 (Prime Video)
A work in progress - we still have a handful of episodes left - but this 2019-set season is already evidently a major return to form for a show that has long been within touching distance of TV greatness. "We've got our own reality." "You can't-- that's not a thing." All the modern world's sins, devoured and digested week by week.
5. Jury Duty (Amazon FreeVee)
The American critics seemed perversely determined not to get this show (it's not cruel enough! It gets the judiciary wrong!); fortunately, the rest of the world embraced it for what it was, namely an appeal to the best in us. A clever hybrid of character comedy and hidden-cam prankery from those behind Borat and the US The Office - select the episode commentary option on FreeVee if you want to know how clever it needed to be to work - this hymn to the ensemble notionally brings us the highlights of a three-week civil case filed against a stumblebum worker accused of singlehandedly bringing down a printing company. The twist: everyone involved is an actor, bar Juror #6, sunny solar panel engineer Ronald Gladden, whose reactions to this three-ring legal circus are wholly unrehearsed. A potentially nasty gotcha was instead steered towards altogether genial entertainment: Gladden gains new playmates, acting lessons from fellow juror James Marsden (expertly playing a preening variation of himself), and finally to lead the jury like Hank Fonda in 12 Angry Men. “We all fell in love with you,” confesses one of his co-stars after the big reveal. You might be swayed, too.
4. How To with John Wilson S3 (HBO in the US; UK broadcast tbc; seasons 1&2 still on iPlayer)
I'm afraid I rather parted ways with Nathan Fielder this year: Jury Duty showed up The Rehearsal's lack of heart and overspills of narcissism, and wherever The Curse was headed, it became clear it could go there without me. (Seriously, you're all bananas for actively seeking more Safdie stress in your lives.) But I remain in synch with Fielder's travelling companion Wilson, who drew his wonderful series of half-hour essays to a close this year with diversions on public bathrooms, sports, working out and birds. Funny, distinctive because personal, and forever outward-looking.
3. Rain Dogs S1 (HBO in the US; BBC1, iPlayer)
Continuing the trend of one leftfield Daisy May Cooper vehicle in the upper echelons for the past seven years. (There may not be a better reader of scripts in the country right now.) A wildly unusual tone for a British set-and-shot comedy to adopt and sustain - the HBO influence is strong - and one epitomised by the mid-series makeover that comes care of a mortician’s make-up brush. Even at its funniest (which is scabrously funny), Cash Carraway’s eight-part riff on the material of her own memoirs never loses sight of the void its characters are circling. Not always comfortable viewing, granted; memorably potent television, nevertheless.
2. Exterior Night (Channel 4)
Serious television, sepulchral to look at. (You don't binge it so much as entomb yourself within it.) Yet it expands beyond the director Marco Bellocchio's excellent Good Morning, Night (a narrative effectively recapped in the course of Episode 4) to describe the death spiral the whole of Italian society seemed to be following at the start of 1978, and - more specifically - a form of self-preserving political theatre that might ultimately be the mortal enemy of any democracy. Forcefully dramatised and exceptionally well acted - forever getting the key personalities to loom up out of the darkness, like folks gasping for air - it should leave you in no doubt as to why this case has haunted Bellocchio (and Italy) for the better part of fifty years: if these men, with all the money and power in the world at their disposal, weren't even willing to save one of their own, what hope is there for the rest of us? Chilling, rather brilliant, and unmistakably the work of a master storyteller.
1. Jubilee (Prime Video) [above]
By some distance, the most gorgeous TV of the year: what happens when you put a streaming budget in the hands of an artist rather than an algorithm. (The lighting choices alone would qualify it as a thing of beauty; like chocolate truffles, the whole thing feels too deluxe to binge, which is why I came to eke it out so.) Has obvious appeal as a Golden Age of Movies melodrama, but the director-showrunner Vikramaditya Motwane refuses to succumb to the nostalgia and romance he evokes in passing: he's all too aware that the film business attracted crooks, cads, cranks, hucksters and stone-cold sociopaths (Madan Kumar,
bhenchod) from the word go. (Equal parts film criticism and entertainment, it's also a rare - possibly unique? - Golden Age narrative that owes at least as much to
Mulholland Dr. as it does
Singin' in the Rain.) The good news is that, in the hands of the right storytellers, crooks, cads, cranks, hucksters and stone-cold sociopaths can make for tremendous, unforgettable characters; and with word, gesture and song, these actors, cast to perfection, sear themselves upon the imagination.
Your move, Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
