Our mid-year pop culture report card is here
Our favourite TV shows, movies and albums from 2023. Plus, what's coming? And everything else you need to map out your weekend's entertainment.
Kia ora! On a recent weekday night I cued up a night’s viewing: the finale of Dead Ringers, another Couples Therapy NZ episode, then Platonic for some light relief. After that, I couldn’t help but think how spoilt for choice we are. Yes, there’s a writers strike, meaning this will likely all soon change, but I can’t remember the last time I had the thought: “I don’t know what to watch.” There’s always something good on. Today, we’re going to celebrate that with our mid-year report card on the best TV, films and albums, followed by a look ahead to what’s coming. Heaps, as it turns out.
-Chris Schulz, senior writer, The Spinoff
Our 10 favourite TV shows of 2023 so far
Barry (Neon)
The Reservoir Dogs-style finale of Bill Hader’s four-season Los Angeles epic was utterly overshadowed by the equally devastating end of Succession on the same day. That’s a shame: this season was Barry’s best yet, a cinematic marvel that went from Breaking Bad to Better Call Saul then back to Breaking Bad without losing any of its off-kilter intensity and pure love for all things Hollywood. Can’t wait to see what Hader does next (a horror film, by the sound of things). /Chris Schulz
Beef (Netflix)
Any show that can make me laugh out loud while also inducing an overwhelming sense of dread deserves to be on a “best of” list. Beef easily fits the bill. What starts off as a simple cat-and-mouse chase following a road rage incident slowly spirals into something far bigger. I spent the first few episodes laughing, and the latter half of the season wincing through some truly uncomfortable moments. It’s a brilliant showcase for leads Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, and absolutely one of the highlights of the year so far. /Stewart Sewman-Lund
Couples Therapy NZ (ThreeNow)
It’s unlike any other local reality show, a deep dive into the relationships of five New Zealand couples with no host, music, elimination rounds or shock tactics on offer. With just a couch and a box of tissues at hand, the drama instead unfolds through subtle shifts in body language or a slight turn of the head. It’s unbelievably tense and uncomfortable. One builds a pillow fort and twirls his wedding ring. Another laughs at every uncomfortable silence. Yes, there are tears. After every episode, I shake my head and say, “Never again.” Yet I’m always back for more. /CS
Dead Ringers (Prime Video)
Does anything sum up 2023 better than Rachel Weisz messily eating felafel and yelling, “Fuck you!” at the guy who just supplied her lunch? Thankfully, Dead Ringers is about much more than rage. With a tone that’s pure 90s cinema, a prescient story about female reproductivity, and a how’d-they-do-that? double act from Weisz, this reboot of David Cronenberg’s 1990 film shocked and stunned throughout its six episodes. I’m glad they made it. I kind of hope they don’t make more. /CS
I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson (Netflix)
The modern comedy can often strain to be so clever, so genre-bending, so peak TV, that it can forget to simply make a joke. Thankfully, Tim Robinson’s stupendously silly sketch show I Think You Should Leave is absolutely nothing but jokes. It will crash into your life like a dating show contestant with a penchant for ziplines and then refuse, ironically, to leave. Dare to enter this munted multiverse of driving crooners, dog hairdos and rat moms, and you might just find the funniest thing of 2023 so far. /Alex Casey
Jury Duty (Prime Video)
Part The Rehearsal, part The Office, Jury Duty was a truly unexpected delight. It follows a very traditional sitcom format – except that the lead character, Ronald, isn’t a “character” at all. He’s a real person sitting through what he believes to be a real (if very bizarre) jury trial, but which is actually a meticulously crafted, hidden camera set-up. Spread across eight episodes, Jury Duty at times fails to maintain its comedic momentum. But when it shines, particularly in the more human moments, it truly shines. /SSL
Somebody Somewhere (Neon)
Somebody Somewhere is, for me, the most necessary show of 2023. No other show has as much heart, as much biting wit, and as much empathy and genuine love for its entire cast. Now in its second season, the show focuses on Sam, a woman in her 40s not just trying to find happiness, but literally finding her singing voice again. At the heart of the show is the growing friendship between her and co-worker Joel (Jeff Hiller), and the push-and-pull between them as they navigates the minefields of approaching middle age while still being in a little bit of an emotional puberty. That might make it sound heavy, but this show is also damn hilarious and ludicrously filthy. I could not recommend it any higher. /Sam Brooks
Succession (Neon)
Logan’s demise in a plane toilet. Tom and Shiv’s game of ‘Bitey’. The election special. That boardroom showdown. Licked cheese and a smoothie smothering. Living+. Colin. That fucking funeral. Sometimes, Succession’s fourth and final season felt like someone really had stuck their dick in the brie. With no holds barred, creator Jesse Armstrong threw every punch possible, and many of those blows landed hard. I don’t think it’s fully sunk in what we had, and I don’t think it’s yet sunk in that it’s gone. When it does, it’s gonna hurt – maybe more than Tom and Shiv yelling, “You kill me, and I kill you,” at each other on a balcony. /CS
Swarm (Prime Video)
If you were wondering what Donald Glover was going to do after Atlanta, you got your answer with Swarm, a grisly seven-part horror show about an obsessive fan. With clever cameos and smart commentary about A-list mega-popstar worship, Swarm was already good, but it’s the performance from Dominique Fishback as Dre – still and composed, then manic and unhinged, always wide-eyed and watching – that announced the arrival of a huge new talent. Now it’s all about what Fishback does next, not Glover. /CS
The Last of Us (Neon)
Perhaps it stuck too close to the source material. Maybe it didn’t feature enough of those freaky mushroom-headed virus-monsters. But HBO’s adaptation of video game hit The Last of Us had three very big things going for it: the apocalyptic relationship between Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the incredible third episode, a standalone love story stunner with Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, and that ending, which, despite being 10 years old now, never loses its impact. /CS
Honourable mentions: Deadloch (Prime Video); The Diplomat (Netflix); Happy Valley’s third season (TVNZ+); High Desert (Apple TV+); Party Down’s third season (TVNZ+); Paul T. Goldman (TBC); Poker Face (TVNZ+); Silo (Apple TV+); Shrinking (Apple TV+); The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime Video); The Power (Prime Video).
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My albums of 2023 so far
I’m still smarting from Laneway’s cancellation back in January, a glitch that’s left me feeling hopelessly out of the loop on the state of music. The albums that have soundtracked this weird time for me are all world-building oddballs offering escapism, from Caroline Polachek’s haunting Desire, I Want to Turn into You to Fever Ray’s chilling comeback Radical Romantics and Young Fathers’ not-so-heavy Heavy Heavy. Deep down, though, I seek music that gives me a pure dopamine hit. 100 Gecs finally wrote some songs, and reaped the rewards, on 10,000 Gecs, and Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA proved to be the best rap supergroup team-up since Run the Jewels on Scaring the Hoes, and Queens of the Stone Age’s In Times New Roman (out today!) is an instant classic. But it’s Skrillex’s post-dubstep Quest For Fire that tops my Apple most-played list. His closing Coachella set (“Never in my wildest dreams…”) with Fred Again and Four Tet remains my go-to happy place for surviving the rest of 2023.
My films of 2023 so far
What are films now? What role do they play? What does going to the movies even mean? They’re big questions yet to be answered in this bleak post-Covid film landscape. Many of this year’s Academy Award-winning films were box office flops. Previously bankable A-list movie stars and directors are no longer the guaranteed drawcards they once were. Yet I still love a big screen experience, and John Wick 4 delivered that knockout blow, with Fast X and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse close behind (both were hampered by their lack of an ending). Elsewhere, I’ve given up on Marvel and DC’s constant content machines and instead seek small-scale thrills. Those that have stayed with me the longest are chilling character portraits: the slow-motion trainwreck of Tár, the pitchfork-thrusting unravelling of Pearl, and the AI-generated horrors of M3GAN, complete with a robo-boogie for the ages.
So what's coming in the second half of 2023?
So much! The second season of The Bear (June 22) is worth getting excited about. Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That… (June 23) is also back next week for those who partake. There’s a fifth season of the always reliable What We Do in the Shadows on the way (July 13), the reboot of Justified: City Primeval (July 18), and new seasons of Marvel’s Loki and Netflix’s Bridgerton. Lots of sport, too: men’s rugby and cricket world cups and the women’s football world cup are all on the horizon.
In theatres, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Pixar’s Elemental land this month, Barbie, Oppenheimer and the NZIFF are due in July, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is coming in October, and Dune 2 and Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins land in November. Perhaps at some point we’ll be lucky enough to see a butt-kicking nun take on an AI god in Mrs Davis, and Blackberry, the cellphone origin story that’s getting rave reviews.
Here’s all the new stuff you can watch right now
With its sixth season landing this week, expect the star-studded new season of dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror to dominate the pop culture discourse for the next wee while. Creator Charlie Brooker recently told GQ he ripped up the rule book and added more comedy to the show, but ended up with “some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever done”. Surely they can’t hit harder than The National Anthem, from season one? You can find out for yourself: all five episodes are available now.
Elsewhere, Three is heavily promoting two new homegrown comedies: Double Parked stars the suddenly-everywhere Madeleine Sami and Antonia Prebble as a same-sex couple trying for a baby who accidentally both get pregnant at the same time, while Homebound 3.0 follows a struggling writer who returns home to live with his clearly disappointed parents. It’s too soon for reviews but both are playing back-to-back on Three’s new-look Thursday night comedy line-up (love that), as well as streaming on ThreeNow.
As for the rest, Netflix has the second season of its nature doco series Our Planet, Disney+ has commissioned a TV series based on the hit 1997 film The Full Monty featuring the original cast, and TVNZ+ has express episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds straight from the US. It’s a big weekend for Neon with the new Hugo Weaving series Seven Types of Ambiguity landing alongside the seventh season of Outlander (yes, that show is still going). Then, early next week, cult comedy fave The Righteous Gemstones returns for a highly anticipated third season.
In theatres, this week’s big blockbuster release is the multiverse saga The Flash that includes several big-name cameos, but not much else. “It spends more time spinning its wheels than reinventing them,” says The Hollywood Reporter. You Hurt My Feelings is out now too, an adult-orientated marriage drama starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus that’s had excellent reviews.. On streaming, take your pick of hard man military action movies with Chris Hemsworth’s high-octane Extraction 2 (Netflix) or Guy Richie and Jake Gyllenhaal’s The Covenant (Prime Video) both making their debut. Decisions, decisions.
For more, check out our weekly New to Streaming guide.
Coming next week: Huge news for those who don’t watch the news
For as long as any of us can remember, older generations have blamed young people for not caring about “the issues of today”. But maybe it’s just that the issues are being discussed differently. 2 Cents 2 Much is a show about the meaty topics in Aotearoa for those who don’t tune into talkback or sit down and watch the 6pm news every night.
From the cost of living crisis to the monarchy, vaping to the revitalisation of te reo Māori, comedian Janaye Henry hosts a bite-sized chat show for young people in Aotearoa today. Made with the support of NZ On Air.
On The Spinoff now:
The All Blacks appear to be gearing up for a change of stream... Duncan Greive reports on the creation of NZR+, and what that means for Sky TV.
How will AI affect media’s future? With 30 years of experience, Matt Bale has some thoughts. He talks to The Fold.
The Tank is a locally-made horror that brings an everyday nightmare to life. Alex Casey talks to director Scott Walker and Wētā Workshop’s Sir Richard Taylor.
The legacy of Footrot Flats lives on in Bluey. We’re not kidding! Director of the kids’ TV juggernaut Richard Jeffery explains why to Tara Ward.
Remember when TVNZ used to cut sections of Blackadder out of the show? Maureen Sinton does. She explains what happened.
Stories need endings but many blockbuster movies seem to have forgotten this crucial fact. This is might be why.
That’s it for Rec Room for this week. If you liked what you read, why not share Rec Room with your friends and whānau.