Patrick Freyne’s favourite – and worst – TV moments of 2023

We all got franchise fatigue

I love superheroes and space wizards as much as the next infantilised consumption monkey – Spiders-man with his spiders, Bat Person hitting people with his bat, Li’l Baby Skywalker and his robot chums – but looking at all the many Marvel and Star Wars properties, even the most action-figure obsessed toddler must be craving a kitchen-sink drama about an alcoholic writer getting a divorce. It’s all such hard work. Loki, The Secret Invasion and Ahsoka all needed an appendix explaining who’s who and how they fit in the wider franchise. And these shows also increasingly feel the same – geographically flat, sonically overwrought and relentlessly quippy. Frankly, I’m not surprised to hear that studios want to replace creators with robots, because I suspect it’s already happened.

The studios wanted to replace writers and actors with robots

This was one of the issues underpinning this year’s WGA writers’ strike and the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike (along with more traditional things such as fair compensation). ChatGPT and his robot chums are a wonderful gift to executives who have long believed that the problem with art was the pesky artists. Why indulge Jane Austen, The Beatles, Russ Abbot or any of the other aesthetic troublemakers when you can gently whisper to a robot sitting atop a pile of stolen art: “Finnegans Wake in the style of Kurt Cobain please but with anime eyes.” Both those strikes won concessions from the studios around the usage of AI material but you can tell that the execs were holding crossed fingers behind their backs.

There’s trouble down national broadcaster

Earlier this year Ryan Tubridy found himself at the heart of Oireachtas TV’s first foray into television drama, aka the Dáil committee meetings on how RTÉ had structured his pay deal. Tubridy became the face of a scandal, even though the details were arcane and he seemed to have little idea what was going on.

It probably wasn’t healthy that the focus was so much on one person given that the issue was systemic dysfunction, but it was all such a mess. Tubridy made it clear to a panel of politicians, each intent on finding the most inherently Irish pronunciation of the word “Renault”, that he knew little about complicated things such as his “salary” or “barter accounts” or “negotiations”.

Claudia Winkleman could be in your midst right now. Security forces live in fear of the day she goes rogue

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‘I have lived so long. Why am I still here?’ Simon Cowell’s beady little eyes seem to say

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The Full Irish Hidden Camera Show understands the craic must be baited, captured and solemnly clubbed to death

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Is it cake? Do not show your worst child this programme! They already suspect everything is cake

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He would turn occasionally to his agent Noel Kelly, who sat to his right hand, and ask questions like: “Where are my shoes?” and “Do I live in a house?” and “What is ‘walking around money’?”. He was but a butterfly on a wheel. And he wasn’t angry with us, just disappointed. He went to England like many before, to toil for Virgin radio in the Shard, leaving us to think about what we had done.

RTÉ has a budget problem for some reason

RTÉ’s arrangements around pay for its richest broadcasters led to a bit of an existential crisis. RTÉ is financially dependent on those notoriously fickle curmudgeons, the general public, and they all have Netflix and rage now. Last year, the soothsayers from the Future of Media commission suggested abolishing the licence fee for this very reason. They felt that secure funding for RTÉ could only come directly from the exchequer. Nobody listened. And now new RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst wanders Montrose counting pens, freezing recruitment, shaking couch cushions for stray coins and asking passing parliamentarians for €50 million. Not to get on my soapbox, but there’s a real danger that the things that suffer at RTÉ will be the news, local news, drama, arts and documentary projects created by less securely employed people and we may not like it when it’s all replaced by teenagers lip-syncing on TikTok. This genuinely makes me sad.

Young people increasingly forgo TV to watch very short videos on TikTok

That’s all I’ll write on that because they probably won’t even read to the end of

The wider TV industry is also in a spin

Terrestrial broadcasters have been feeling the pressure of international streamers stealing their delicious eyeballs, but streamers themselves are realising that streaming isn’t as reliable a business as Netflix led us all to believe when it was chucking diamonds at auteurs. Netflix is cutting back. Other streamers such as Disney, Amazon and Apple have bigger businesses of which streaming is just a minor component. And so, after a decade of wild spending, streaming services are finally getting stingy.

There were some incredibly expensive flops

HBO spent $75 million on The Idol, a programme in which a large-cheeked popstrel (Lily-Rose Depp) has an erotic dalliance with a plank of wood (misspelt singer The Weeknd). Amazon paid $250 million for Citadel, when it could have just whispered to an AI: “The Bourne Trilogy meets Grand Theft Auto with big anime eyes.” It also emerged this year that Netflix gave $55 million to some guy to develop a still unmade TV adaptation of 47 Ronin, some of which he invested in crypto. This feels like a metaphor.

What constitutes a ‘comedy’ got increasingly confusing

Two of the best programmes this year were HBO’s Barry, the ostensibly funny but actually disturbing tale of a thespian hitman, and Disney’s The Bear, the frenetically creative story of a chef reviving his dead brother’s business. Both are technically “comedies” and while they’re excellently odd and innovative, you can go whole episodes without laughing. Meanwhile, HBO’s hourlong dynastic drama Succession and Apple’s spy romp Slow Horses are hilarious. The comedy/drama dichotomy has collapsed and thrown my compass off. Recently I found myself laughing uproariously along to a work of dark satire that turned out to be Prime Time.

I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is now a reputation laundering service for disgraced and disgraceful right-wing politicians

Last year the jungle-based celebrity-torture show featured outgoing health minister Matt Hancock fresh from mishandling a pandemic. This year we got Nigel Farage, tribbling like a gentle jungle slug, catching flies with his long tongue and emitting a high whistle that only certain viewers could hear. Watching Farage being submerged in a box of snakes, it’s hard not to feel for the snakes and to wonder what they’d done to deserve this. Perhaps they were bad snakes who ran a racist campaign to leave a trading bloc.

Reality TV producers now view celebrityness as the pre-eminent human quality. An actor, a TV presenter, a controversial politician, a serial killer, a war criminal, they’re all just celebrities to them now. I’m pretty sure that they’d put Jimmy Savile in the jungle if they could raise him from the dead. Some viewers would soon start feeling warmly towards Zombie Saville purely because he wasn’t actively abusing anyone on-screen and his eyes kept falling out.

I also really liked a lot of programmes and am now going to list some of them

• Poker Face
• Atlanta
• RTÉ Investigates
• Barry
• Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
• Slow Horses
• Silo
• The Last of Us (particularly episode 3)
• Kin (after they made scenery-chewing Francis Magee more central)
• Succession
• The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby
• Doctor Who
• Extraordinary
• Happy Valley
• Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost
• Somebody Somewhere
• Gen V
• Reservation Dogs
• Marty’s Big Picture Show
• Bodies
• Upfront with Katie Hannon
• Yellowjackets
• The Late Late Toy Show
• Beef

God, I love television.