📺 I have high hopes for the fourth season of True Detective. There is no one better to play a detective in an ice-cold town than Jodie Foster. And the frigid, sunless setting pairs well with the Arctic weather we have been having. Now if only the murder mystery itself actually went somewhere.

It was a good year for television! Or for my clearing the backlog, as some of these came out years ago:

• The Last of Us, which I have to thank for making my wife interested in something video game-related. Because Pedro Pascal is in it, to be clear, but I’ll take it.
• Severance would have been even better if played at 1.25x. The office party scene was masterful, though, and at the right speed.
• Slow Horses, Season 2 and Season 3 were the best 12 hours of live-action TV this year.
• Ted Lasso, Season 3 was a disappointment the more I think about it, so I try to think about it less.
• The Bear, Season 2 was the opposite of Lasso and I look forward to Season 3.
• Guy’s Grocery Games was a bad habit which we broke shortly after I wrote about it.
• The Afterparty, Season 2, which was… fine, but a bit too West coast for my taste. Unlike…
• Only Murders in the Building, Season 3, which hit just the right spot. The soundtrack is still a hit with the family on our rides to school.
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake was the perfect sequel to the original.
• Bodies were a nice surprise, although Primer (2004) is still the only one with time travel that makes sense.
• The Great British Baking Show, Season who-knows-which had some of the “worst” contestants to date — quotation marks here because they were all good both in personality and baking skills — but some of the best moments, so one of the better seasons overall.
• Scavengers Reign were the best 6 hours of any TV this year. Not for everyone, to be sure, but I hope it will be for enough people for their flaky Warner/Discovery corporate overlords to order another season.

Last year’s list is here.

📺 Scavengers Reign (2023) was hands down the best six hours of streaming I saw this year. It’s Adventure Time for adults; Saga for television; Fantastic Planet for the 2020s; and, yes, all in the Moebius style that influenced Miyazaki’s Nausicaä… so much that it’s probably the first thing that will come to mind after seeing the first few scenes.

But Scavengers Reign is not a mishmash of those, but a new and distinct work all of its own, with a better soundtrack and better voice acting than anything that’s come before. Highly recommended.

📺 Continuing my write-about-it-before-you’re-done-watching series, I would like to turn everyone’s attention to Scavengers Reign. Six of 12 episodes in, and it’s the best thing on TV so far this year. Between that and Across the Spider-Verse, 2023 has been stellar for animation.

📺 Three episodes in, the third season of Slow Horses is the best one yet, and also the best live-action series I’ve seen this year (with a nod to Only Murders…). Fun fact: that theme song which sounds awfully lot like it was sung by Mick Jagger was sung by — Mick Jagger!

📺 The Great British Baking Show has punched up its competitors' affability this year, to the detriment of skill. It was the right tradeoff!

Side note: I have a hard time squaring Britain’s supposed decline with this show. If only other countries could decay so gracefully.

And the best one hour of anything I’ve seen this year just came out on YouTube: Kurzgesagt’s 4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour video. Good television isn’t dead, but is it television?

The funniest 10 minutes of TV I saw this year was made in 1953. What on Earth happened to American television? (ᔥThe Scholar’s Stage)

It was better than the average Netflix series — which isn’t saying much — but also has a better than average time travel story line, so definitely recommended. The premise, which you get from the promo, is that the same dead body shows up in the same London alley in four different time periods; the following few bullet points have mild spoilers, so, caveat lector:

• In the way it deals with travel through time it most directly resembles Predestination (2014), and if I were to directly compare the two I would say that Bodies makes the point that both of them are attempting to make in a much better way, and adds a few more points that are as important if not more so.
• And yet there is still a plot hole, and of course the plot hole — as in Predestination — has to do with biology. Either writers of science fiction can’t quite grasp how chaotic life is, or are hoping that the general public doesn’t so that they can prove their point.
• You may think, as the story takes its second-to-last turn, that it poo-pooed its own premise, and I had this sinking feeling that we were in Back to the Future land, but this was ultimately unfounded. Whew.
• We are much further away from World War 2 than WW2 was from the Victorian period, and it is one thing to read about progress and stagnation and yet another to see what a person born in the 1870s–1880s experienced in their lifetime.
• There is mercifully little of the future in this series, but what little of it there is serves as an excellent example of humans being better at creating the future than imagining it.
• There is a “Deutsch particle” in Bodies, and it ties with Hofstadter’s Spiderverse… mention as my favorite meta/physical Easter egg, which is, admittedly, a rather narrow category.
• I haven’t read the graphic novel the show was based on, but I much preferred its stylistic choices in how it showed its roots than those that Watchmen (2009) or The Sandman (2022) took. However, Watchmen (2019) is still five heads and ten shoulders above everything else.

📺🎶 The soundtrack of Only Murders in the Building continues to be our commuting go-to. All of the faux-musical numbers are now available, and listening to our 11-year-old sing along to the tongue-twisting Pickwick Triplets… is beyond delightful.