The Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2023

Everything old will try to be new again this year in television. The 2023 shows we’re most intrigued to see include unexpected revivals, long-delayed new seasons of old favorites, cutting-edge creators revisiting past eras of pop culture history and much more. 

Beef (Netflix)

No, it’s not a spinoff of The Bear (the wonderful FX on Hulu show about a Chicago sandwich shop), because the beef in this dark dramedy is strictly the metaphorical kind. A down-on-his-luck contractor (Steven Yeun) and an overextended businesswoman (Ali Wong) get into a road-rage incident that soon spirals wildly out of control, leading to a series of major and minor attacks that threatens to destroy both of their lives in the process. Yeun is a budding superstar who can play almost any tone well, and Wong showed an impressively expanded dramatic range in last year’s Paper Girls. This show is a stark change from the last time these two teamed up: voicing a pair of happy lovebirds on the animated comedy Tuca & Bertie. (Not coincidentally, Beef was created by former Tuca writer Lee Sung Jin.) Making these two into mortal enemies is sure to be explosive. 

Bupkis (Peacock)

Some SNL cast members become famous for their original characters or killer impressions; some become stars primarily by being themselves. Pete Davidson is firmly in the latter category, with a personality so distinct that his lack of mimicry skills on the sketch show didn’t much matter. Davidson has already capitalized on his singular appeal with a film loosely inspired by his life, 2020’s The King of Staten Island. Now, he’s playing a fictionalized version of himself in a comedy series (with Lorne Michaels as one of the producers, of course) that co-stars Edie Falco as his mom and Joe Pesci (in his first ongoing TV role since 1985’s short-lived Half Nelson, whose ridiculous opening-credit sequence seems to go viral every six months) as his grandfather. Announced guest stars so far include Charlie Day, Everybody Loves Raymond onscreen siblings Ray Romano and Brad Garrett, and Davidson’s old SNL co-star Kenan Thompson. No word on who’ll play the many singers, models and reality stars who will presumably enter his character’s dating life. 

The Curse (Showtime, TBD)

Individually, Nathan Fielder (Nathan for You, The Rehearsal) and Benny Safdie (Good Time, Uncut Gems) have made some of the most profoundly uncomfortable filmed entertainment of this century — we’re talking the kind that can leave audiences burying their faces in their hands and questioning the life choices that led to watching this. The two of them teaming up as actors and co-creators of this comedy should create a vibe of awkwardness that’ll be palpable from outer space. Thankfully, the premise — “an alleged curse disturbs the relationship of a newly married couple as they try to conceive a child while co-starring on their problematic new HGTV show” — and the presence of Emma Stone as their co-star make The Curse sound more appealing than mortifying. Even if we plan to watch it while hiding behind our couches. 

Daisy Jones and the Six (Prime Video, March 3)

2023 is going to be quite the year for shows based on novels about fictional rock bands. Apple has a reimagined take on Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire coming later this year, but first Amazon has its spin on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling fake oral history about a Seventies rock supergroup, with more than a few Fleetwood Mac undertones. Riley Keough and Sam Claflin star in a miniseries adapted by the 500 Days of Summer team of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. 

Fargo (FX, TBD)

On the one hand, the two most recent Fargo seasons have had a lot of ups and downs. On the other, the highs have remained incredibly high, and the cast that Noah Hawley has assembled for his latest Coen Brothers-adjacent adventure includes Juno Temple, Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh. This time around, the action takes place in 2019, revolving around the questions, “When is a kidnapping not a kidnapping,” and “What if your wife isn’t yours?” 

Full Circle (HBO Max, TBD)

His movies get all the love, but Steven Soderbergh is an underappreciated TV auteur, most notably for his great Cinemax historical hospital drama The Knick. So when he puts together a killer cast — including Zazie Beetz, Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant, Dennis Quaid, Jharrel Jerome and Jim Gaffigan — for a sprawling New York-set crime miniseries (about all the secrets uncovered by an investigation into a botched kidnapping), written by Men in Black and Now You See Me’s Ed Solomon (a previous collaborator on Soderbergh’s interactive TV show Mosaic) that sounds a bit like the approach he took with Traffic? Consider us very interested.

History of the World, Part II (Hulu, TBD)

Mel Brooks’ 1981 sketch-comedy film History of the World, Part I is perhaps best known for the French Revolution-era gag where Brooks kisses the chest of a beautiful young woman, turns to the camera, and smugly declares, “It’s good to be the king.” (Well, it’s either that or the elaborate song-and-dance number about the Spanish Inquisition: “Confess! Don’t be boring.”) But the end of the movie left viewers dangling, with Brooks promising a sequel that would feature skits like “Hitler on Ice,” “A Viking Funeral,” and “Jews in Space” (the latter teasing a glimpse of Orthodox Jewish men roaming the galaxy in Star of David-shaped spaceships). Forty-two years later, Brooks — in collaboration with Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz and other comic minds of later generations who will also appear on camera — finally lives up to his word. L’chaim! 

The Idol (HBO, TBD)

Sure, The Weeknd has starred in many music videos, and got into a fight with Adam Sandler’s character in Uncut Gems. But can he carry a weekly TV series? If it’s set in the world of pop stardom, he sure can. In The Idol, which he co-created with Euphoria mastermind Sam Levinson, the artist born Abel Tesfaye stars as a nightclub impresario who gets involved in the life of a singer (Lily-Rose Depp) as she attempts to come back from a nervous breakdown. This isn’t the first time Levinson’s worked with a Canadian-born music star: Drake is a producer on Euphoria. Maybe if The Weeknd needs some acting tips, he can ping the guy who starred in DeGrassi.

Justified: City Primeval (FX, TBD)

For six seasons in the early-to-mid-2010s, Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens was the coolest, quippiest, most trigger-happy lawman on TV, and the story of Justified ended as well as any drama has in recent memory. Now he’s back, but in a miniseries based on a different Elmore Leonard story, set in the great crime novelist’s beloved Detroit. We imagine Raylan will have many opportunities to think on his best piece of shared wisdom: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

The Last of Us (HBO, January 15)

The track record for video games being adapted into movies and television shows is not great. But The Last of Us seems to have several factors in its favor. First, it has the zombie post-apocalypse game’s writer and co-director, Neil Druckmann, working on it as one of its chief adapters. Second, the show’s other co-creator, Craig Mazin, happens to be coming off the titanic achievement that was the award-winning miniseries Chernobyl. And third, it has one hell of a cast, centered around Game of Thrones alums Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as two survivors making their way across a desolate America, 20 years after the world as we know it ended.    

Masters of the Air (Apple TV+, TBD)

First, there was Saving Private Ryan. Then Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg took their World War II fascination to premium cable with the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, which has become perhaps the most beloved piece of dad programming ever made. In 2010, they followed it with the raw and visceral The Pacific. More than a decade later, and now away from HBO, the duo reteam (along with Band writers Graham Yost and John Orloff) for the latest chapter in this Greatest Generation collaboration, about bomber crews in the war’s European theater. Where the previous projects had largely white ensembles, this one will feature Black characters. Ncuti Gatwa (soon to star in Doctor Who) joins Austin Butler (aka Elvis) and Barry Keoghan to head up a cast composed of mostly unknowns. But Band and Pacific had future stars like Damian Lewis and Rami Malek, so don’t be surprised to see breakouts from this talented group.

Mrs. Davis (Peacock, April 20)

Damon Lindelof — aka the mind behind Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen — teams with Big Bang Theory/Young Sheldon writer Tara Hernandez for a series starring GLOW alum Betty Gilpin as a vengeful nun who goes to war against a powerful algorithm that more or less runs the world. Details are scant beyond that premise, and the fact that the show co-stars Jake McDorman (Limitless) as another person with a vendetta against the algorithm. But when Lindelof makes something new, we pay attention. Always. 

Party Down (Starz, February 24)

Are we having an unexpected revival yet? The original 2009-10 run of this show about a team of frustrated cater-waiters was among this century’s best, smartest, filthiest ensemble comedies. It was also among the least-watched, with barely 13,000 people tuning in to see what was then the series finale. Somehow, nearly the entire original cast — including Adam Scott, Ken Marino, Jane Lynch, Martin Starr, Ryan Hansen and Megan Mullally — have come back for six new episodes, along with new faces like James Marsden, Jennifer Garner, Tyrel Jackson Williams and Zoë Chao. Don’t ask why; just enjoy. 

The Mandalorian (Disney+, March 1)

Speaking of Pascal, the other show where he plays the stoic, deadly guardian of a pint-sized sidekick finally gets its third season. But that’s only in an official sense, since nearly half of last year’s The Book of Boba Fett turned out to be a stealth Mandalorian mini-season. Several major developments — particularly Mando and Grogu’s reunion — happened on Book of Boba Fett, which raises the question of how, or if, Mandalorian will explain this to whatever percentage of its audience doesn’t watch the other Disney+ Star Wars shows. Regardless, it will be nice to have Mando and his little buddy back.  

Poker Face (Peacock, January 24)

Glass Onion mastermind Rian Johnson continues his campaign to make everything old in pop culture feel new again, this time with a Columbo-esque Mystery Of the Week series starring Natasha Lyonne as a woman with the uncanny ability to recognize a lie as soon as someone utters it. There was already plenty of Columbo in Lyonne’s performance on Russian Doll, and when you combine her, Johnson, and guest stars like Adrien Brody, Chloe Sevigny, Judith Light and Nick Nolte, this sounds like a game we very much want to be dealt in on. 

Shōgun (FX, TBD)

James Clavell’s sweeping literary epic, about an English sailor who gets shipwrecked in feudal Japan, was already turned into a TV miniseries back in 1980. That version, starring Richard Chamberlain and Japanese legend Toshiro Mifune, was a huge hit, but was also subject to some of the creative, technical and sociological limitations of the time. Now, Counterpart creator Justin Marks and his author-wife Rachel Kondo have taken a new crack at the material, with a cast led by Hiroyuki Sanada, Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai.  

Shrinking (Apple TV+, January 27)

Who knew that Harrison Ford was so eager to be a television star? Not long after he joined the Yellowstone-verse with 1923, Ford co-stars in the latest show from Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence and Ted Lasso actor/writer Brett Goldstein. Shrinking is primarily about Jason Segel, as a recently-widowed therapist struggling to pull himself out of a long streak of self-destructive behavior, so expect a lot of the similar blend of silly and melancholy that typifies what Lawrence and Goldstein do with Jason Sudeikis. That’s also been a tonal sweet spot for Ford at different points in his career, so we’re looking forward to seeing him back in something of a Working Girl mode.

Succession (HBO, Spring TBD)

Succession took all of 2022 off, and if any show earned such a lengthy hiatus, it was the masterful saga of the Roy family’s quest to make everyone — both within the clan and throughout the world — utterly miserable. Season Three ended with Kendall, Shiv, and Roman all on the outs after a failed coup, while Logan teamed up with tech billionaire Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) to try to finally bring the company into the 21st century. Skarsgård is back for Season Four, and don’t be surprised if Lukas and Logan clash to the point where one or more of the prodigal children gets brought back into the fold by their dad to help fend off his new partner.

True Detective: Night Country (HBO, TBD)

Even after the Mahershala Ali-led third season washed away much of the bad taste of True Detective’s disastrous second installment, it was hard to muster much enthusiasm for the franchise to continue. But with the departure of original creator Nic Pizzolatto, replaced by writer-director Issa López, the title seems poised for a fresh restart. And the new Arctic-set mystery stars Jodie Foster in her first continuing TV role in nearly 50 years — giving True Detective its first primary female lead. (Rachel McAdams played second fiddle to Colin Farrell in Season Two.) 

Yellowjackets (Showtime, March 24)

Unlike Succession or Ted Lasso, Yellowjackets didn’t completely sit out 2022, as the final three episodes of Season One aired last January. Still, it’s been a minute since we left our soccer teammate heroines — both as teenagers trapped in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash, and as middle-aged survivors being threatened by mysterious forces in the present — so it will be great to have more time with Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci and friends. 

From Rolling Stone US.