The ebb and flow of titles is always unpredictable, so I thought I’d do something a little different this week. Last week saw 13 new shows and movies by women. This week sees just one, “Past Lies” from Spain. It’s frustrating when that happens, but rather than just pitch a single title up here, I’ll take the opportunity to share some standout shows by women I’ve seen so far from this year. First, let’s tell you about “Past Lies”:
NEW SERIES
Past Lies (Hulu) directed by Julia de Paz, Clara Roquet
A group of successful women are shaken when the 25-year-old remains of a missing high school classmate are found in Mallorca, where they shared their senior trip. Star Elena Anaya may be familiar to American audiences from her lead role in “The Skin I Live In”.
Director Clara Roquet won Best New Director and was nominated for Original Screenplay at the 2022 Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. Director and co-writer Julia de Paz was nominated for Adapted Screenplay the same year.
“Past Lies” premieres on Hulu tomorrow, Friday May 10.
THIS YEAR’S SHOWS SO FAR
Links go to my reviews, let’s get in:
“Fallout” (Amazon) is one of the best shows of the year. It’s an incredibly biting and visually beautiful post-apocalyptic dark comedy co-showrun by Geneva Robertson-Dworet. It works as an adventure, as action, as science-fiction, as character drama, and especially as a dark comedy. Watching it kind of broke me because as fun as it is, its retrofuturist satire bites deeply into modern anxieties.
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (Amazon) is a spy comedy showrun by Francesca Sloane. Dry humor in an unsettling atmosphere makes for an incredibly unique feeling – the whole show is quirky but tense. There are multiple memorable guest stars, which is usually a feature I don’t care much about, but here it’s used very well and in ways that sometimes undermine the concept. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star, and the pair act the hell out of it.
Those two are pretty intense. If you need something lighter but still very worthwhile, “Renegade Nell” (Disney+) is a really fun historical adventure/comedy about a woman forced to become a thief. It’s showrun by Sally Wainwright. I’d compare it to a period “Buffy” with much higher production values, or a series-level “Pirates of the Caribbean” without the baggage. If the first episode doesn’t hook you, you are unhookable.
“Death and Other Details” (Hulu) is fun if you can get along with its period-mystery-in-modern-times vibe. Mandy Patinkin plays the wacky detective. It’s co-showrun by Heidi Cole McAdams. Its quirk might come off as overly precious to some, but I ended up liking its diorama-esque stylization. It acts like a stage comedy, which is something I look for, but you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly if it’s your thing or not.
And of course, “Abbott Elementary” (Hulu) is still a great comedy co-showrun by Quinta Brunson. The writing has an incredibly good feel for its ensemble and where their strengths lie. Usually a sitcom gets its good writing in early seasons and the ensemble develop their timing in later ones, but “Abbott Elementary” has enjoyed both right off the bat.
I’m working on “Unnatural” (Netflix) right now. I loved Nogi Akiko’s police series “MIU404” because it presented a way that police can help people from a non-antagonistic perspective, and it focused on both large and small cases. Not everything was high drama, life-or-death stakes. Its sensibilities were completely different from an American cop show. “MIU404” is still on Netflix. I highly recommend it, and I’m thrilled Nogi’s prior series “Unnatural” – about a woman leading a forensics team investigating odd deaths – is now there, too.
On my watchlist are the second season of Tima Shomali’s Jordanian drama “AlRawabi School for Girls” (Netflix). The first season was incredibly salient, punctuating an intriguing interpersonal drama about bullying with some rattling scenes.
I also need to watch Korean vigilante mystery “A Killer Paradox” (Netflix) written by Kim Da Min, and I keep hearing really good things about Vivienne Medrano’s animated musical-in-hell series “Hazbin Hotel” (Amazon) so I’ll be checking that out.
In this feature, I limit the weekly coverage to series showrun or directed by women (or else I couldn’t do the amount of research I have to do weekly). But I do want to highlight how good of a year it’s been for anime written (or based on work written) by women:
“The Apothecary Diaries” (Crunchyroll) is the best mystery going for a second year in a row. It follows Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary in Imperial China. She wants to remain anonymous and live a quiet life of testing poisons on herself, but her knowledge of chemistry and medicine means she can make connections between clues others can’t. The mysteries are balanced between small and large, between incidental and intentional, and its protagonist is a unique blend of tenacious and lazy that you usually don’t see – especially for women characters. “The Apothecary Diaries” is based on a light novel series by Hyuuga Natsu.
“Delicious in Dungeon” (Netflix) is a rangy fantasy series that tells its story through cooking (of fantasy creatures), written by Ueno Kimiko and based on a manga series by Kui Ryouko. Its talented but sometimes bumbling adventuring party is a familiar anchor of fantasy, but done very well here. As they set out to resurrect one of the party’s sisters before a dragon fully digests her, what makes the show unique is how it world-builds. They’re broke, so they cook monsters along the way. Hunting and cooking requires knowledge of the dungeon’s ecology and environmental impacts, which in turn reveal complex relationships between the world and its magic. It’s deeply thought out and surprisingly engrossing. And while it’s not primarily an action series, its action scenes are phenomenal.
“7th Time Loop” (Crunchyroll) is one of the best uses of time loop fiction I’ve seen, about a woman who repeats five years, each time taking a different career. Every time, a war that envelops the world causes her death, and she restarts that five year chunk. She keeps the skills and knowledge she accumulates each go-round, and makes it her mission to use these to stop the war. It’s written by Machida Touko and based on a light novel series by Amekawa Touko. I would’ve preferred it got an extra episode to give the ending some more room to breathe, but it has such incredible character writing along the way that it’s a minor flaw. There are scenes here that are so literary and layered they should be studied if you’re even remotely interested in storytelling.
“A Sign of Affection” (Crunchyroll) is a superb and tranquil romance between a deaf woman and a man who learns sign language. What I like about it is that things don’t come easy – and I don’t mean the usual trope of dragging the will they-won’t they out. What I mean is that both characters question if they truly like each other or simply see in each other an idea they want to embody in themselves. Yuki’s been sheltered and likes that Itsuomi travels the world. Does she like him, or just that he represents a wider world out there? Itsuomi travels because he seeks out new experiences. Does he like her, or is she simply a new experience that will fade once familiar? The great gentleness and care for the other with which they figure this out already provides the answer, but even if the anime itself is pretty sentimental, it’s refreshing to see this realistic complexity and sense of responsibility be the core of the story. It’s also a really good view on a man doing the work to unlearn assumptions and understand someone else’s perspective. Itsuomi doesn’t automatically know how to understand and relate to someone who’s deaf, and he makes clear mistakes, but he does the work to unlearn bad habits and replace them with recognition and communication.
This last one is current season, so only halfway in, but “Train to the End of the World” (Crunchyroll) is a very hidden gem. It fuses wholesome with disturbing as four girls drive a train through an incredibly artistic and metaphorical post-apocalypse to find their lost friend. It’s cosmic horror if the power of very stubborn friendship was enough to fight your way through it, and holding onto that in the face of unprecedented weirdness has its own way of speaking to our times. It’s written by Yokote Michiko.
Now to the top 10. First off, what didn’t make my list and why am I so horrible for not considering it? There’s one that I just can’t get on board, and it wins all the awards and makes people argue over which horrible wealthy person they love the most and think should have all the money and they’d give their money to if they were real and ugh. That’s right, it’s “Succession”. Never gonna put it on my list, and those are just a few of the many reasons why.
Allow me my yearly paragraph(s) to state I’ve tried “Succession” and I just can’t bring myself to get invested in billionaires fighting over money. I could barf at the thinkpieces that came out when the series landed, telling us how AOC and Elizabeth Warren could change their messaging to acknowledge that wealth was its own punishment. I went to a boarding prep school on a ton of scholarship and financial aid. I learned to chameleon in with a lot of rich people – probably not that well, but the point is I got to see some of those families in their natural environment.
Some were good, some were bad, some were kind, some were awful, some families suffered horribly from their wealth, others were having the time of their lives with it. Wealth is not some excruciating burden the rich suffer so the rest of us don’t have to, nor should suffering while happening to be wealthy excuse someone from the corruption and abuse that wealth augments.
I don’t know why we keep telling ourselves the myth of the burdened billionaire, or if I do know I think it disappoints me too much to think that could possibly be the case. I understand this isn’t all of what “Succession” does, but it is a part of it, and it genuinely grates on me. I love a lot of the actors on “Succession” and I was jumping up and down telling everyone about Sarah Snook years beforehand, but…I just can’t get on board a segment of the priorities “Succession” relies upon to tell its story. There’s an entry on this list (“Queenmaker”) that asks many of the same questions, investigates accountability and redemption in very realistic terms, and does so without falling into traditional pitfalls of choosing our favorite billionaire that we’ve had countless opportunities to outgrow.
Is that an unreasonable judgment on “Succession”? I look around and see so many amazing series that I can spend my reason on better. Like this:
10. Am I Being Unreasonable?
(Hulu) Nic is a mother who self-medicates with alcohol to dull a traumatic loss. She dislikes her marriage and feels isolated until she meets a new mom at school. This would be Jen, and the pair find joy feeding on each others’ chaos. Our first impression of every character isn’t good, and that’s the point. “Am I Being Unreasonable?” constantly morphs genres and perspectives in order to reconsider our previous impressions and reveal how wrong they were.
What’s remarkable and unique about “Am I Being Unreasonable?” is that our judgments become the framework of the storytelling. The series sells itself and its characters short in our eyes to appear simpler and sillier than it really is, only to take a 90 degree turn and reveal what’s really happening…and then another 90 degree turn from there to reveal a new misread we’ve made. The thing is, the show rarely distracts or lies. It just lets us make assumptions, and then gives us more information so we can realize how toxic and misleading the assumptions we’ve made have been.
Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli play Nic and Jen, and also write and showrun the series. I started out disliking every character because the question in the title isn’t just about them – it’s about the viewer. The series casts in stark relief how much we rely on being unreasonable in order to tell and be told stories – on the screen and in real life. (Read the review.)
9. The Apothecary Diaries
(Crunchyroll) Maomao is a girl who serves as the apothecary for a red-light district. On her way home, she’s kidnapped and sold as a servant to the Imperial Palace. She tries to keep her head down as she serves out a forced 2-year contract, but as the emperor’s children grow ill, she has to pipe up when she’s the only one with the knowledge to help them.
Her experience with poisons gets her promoted as a food taster in the Inner Palace, where the emperor’s four concubines and their ladies-in-waiting reside. Mysteries both intentional and accidental flourish among the court politics, some women finding it an honor to be there, others wanting out. A eunuch who Maomao bristles at runs the Inner Palace and harasses her, but she tolerates him because he brings her cases and allows her free reign to experiment with foods and medicines. She learns to get what she wants while still drawing clear lines and being protected by the concubine she serves.
Maomao is an exceptional and complicated character. She’s obsessed with testing poisons on herself and is quick to assess what someone else’s goals are. She’s ambitiously lazy, but also doesn’t want others shouldering work that she could be helping with. She’s content to be walked all over when she doesn’t see anything to gain from standing up, but she can command a room and fearsomely put everyone in their place when there’s a truth that must be communicated. She doesn’t want to be noticed and fears making a mistake that will see her executed, but she’ll dismiss and scold royalty if it means saving someone. She’s an exceptional detective, but she often protects the criminals when she thinks their actions have reason, or the revelation of a truth will do more harm than good.
The mysteries themselves are varied and the motives human – often understandable, if misguided. No two mysteries follow the same formula in terms of the investigation and the evolution of clues, making the path each takes feel tenuous and consequential.
The art is stunning, often at the level of a film. It’s colorful and its sense of lighting is evocative. It also has a great eye for timing – whether it’s for the broadest physical comedy or the smallest change in a character’s expression. This is up there with the very best mystery series I’ve seen in the last several years.
8. The Worst of Evil
(Hulu) Gicheul is a club DJ in 1990s Gangnam. Discontent with his role as a minor drug dealer within a crime syndicate, he quietly masses a rebellion against the region’s leader and takes the area over.
Junmo is a tenacious rural police officer who is chosen to go undercover and join Gicheul’s gang. The only problem is that Gicheul once knew Junmo’s wife Euijung, and that she’s a police officer. A chance encounter complicates Junmo’s cover story and throws Euijung into the fray.
What makes “The Worst of Evil” work so well is its focus on small details. Emotional vulnerabilities give Junmo access to the gang as he pretends to be a fallen comrade’s cousin. They’re also what let Gicheul exploit Junmo and Euijung as the undercover operation becomes messier and messier.
But those emotions are just the start. That fine detail work lets them sell their undercover stories. It’s not emotional distrust that begins to carve away Gicheul’s confidence in Junmo, or even the introduction of Euijung. It’s a small, everyday detail overlooked in an operation that throws a wrench into the works. What threatens Junmo the most is the operation he’s a part of making too many of these small mistakes.
The fight choreography is beautifully choreographed chaos, where technique rises and falls as mass fights get more and more desperate. It creates an ebb and flow where characters lose and regain control over how they engage others. It’s choreography that communicates there are rarely winners in a fight, but rather a side that can afford the human cost more than the other. The set design and cinematography are brilliant and repulsive. It feels like everything’s coated in a layer of cigarette ash, which complements the visual translation of the series’ barely controlled violence. It forms a well of brutality over which Junmo and Gicheul dance, where the real clash is how quickly Gicheul can erode details as Junmo and his undercover operation improvise and manipulate new ones into being. (Read the review.)
7. Skip and Loafer
(Crunchyroll) We go from the most brutal entry on this list to the kindest. Mitsumi dreams of working in government, so she transfers from the countryside to a Tokyo high school. She stays with her Aunt Nao, a trans woman who is deeply nurturing and protective of her niece.
Mitsumi has a plan for school, but her anxieties are realized when everything that can go wrong does. Luckily, her first friend there is a supportive boy named Sosuke. He’s effortlessly popular, but feels isolated by guilt and harbors a sadness at his core. Whereas Mitsumi is filled with anxiety and struggles socially, she also has a deep well of hope and carries with her the support of her community and family.
Mitsumi and Sosuke are two beautifully human characters who recognize the ways in which the other needs kindness and support. Even if they don’t always realize how or why, they draw what’s best out of each other, and those around them start doing this for each other, too.
Director Deai Kotomi has an eye for picking up the subtle ways in which people feel vulnerable, mask that vulnerability, or feel safe enough around someone to unmask it. Her sunny, breezy, pastel color scheme is punctuated by deeply textural visual moments. Mitsumi’s hometown is a breathtaking work of art, told in one episode I can only describe as utter peace. The series is beautiful and heartwarming and made me cry for the rarest of reasons – not because anything sad happens, but just because it feels like a place where it’s reassuring to do so. “Skip and Loafer” is a gift of kindness. (Read the mini-review.)
6. Reservation Dogs
(Hulu) If you haven’t started “Reservation Dogs”, you’re lucky. You’ve got three seasons of one of the funniest and most touching shows waiting for you. The comedy follows four Native American teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma. The third season finds them returning from a disastrous but very needed trip. It’s filled with brilliantly interwoven jokes, where one punchline barely finishes before the next is set up.
Episodes aren’t afraid of following tangents, only to reveal later how that tangent is deeply related to a character or their community. By now, the mythological Deer Lady has gotten an episode a season, and this season’s is a devastating entry housed in history.
She’s not alone – “Reservation Dogs” makes the best use of guest stars of any series running. Graham Greene has a beautifully felt performance, and there’s a surprise or two later in the season. “Reservation Dogs” is rife with humor that pokes fun at white co-optations of Native experiences, excising these and replacing them with far better, indigenous comedy. The cast is a blend of actors and comedians young and old who have extremely different approaches, and showrunner Sterlin Harjo utilizes this to make every episode flexible and unpredictable. You rarely know what’s actually going to happen next, whether it will be outlandish or understated, raucous comedy or piercing drama.
“Reservation Dogs” has made my top 10 each of its three seasons. It boasts some of the best individual episodes of every year it’s been on. Give it a try if you haven’t; it’s well worth it.
5. Queenmaker
CW: sexual assault, suicide
(Netflix) Cutthroat corporate strategist Hwang Do Hee has never met a truth she couldn’t massage through the media and turn on its head. Her unswerving loyalty to the wealthy Son family she serves causes her to disbelieve a sexual assault victim and bully her toward an NDA, covering up a rape by Son’s son-in-law Baek Jae Min and resulting in the victim’s suicide. Her illusions broken, Do Hee goes to war with the family she once served.
The Son family runs Baek himself for mayor of Seoul, Korea’s capital. The position is a stepping stone to the Korean presidency. Do Hee approaches Oh Kyung Sook, an incorruptible lawyer-turned-activist who’s never met a truth she isn’t willing to fight for, and who very justifiably hates Do Hee. The pair decide to run Oh as a candidate, Do Hee maneuvering according to her own talents, but bound by Oh’s ethics instead of her own.
This series has the writing of the year for me. A lot happens, so much that it’s difficult to believe it could all transpire in one election…until you look around at how much more happens in our real-life elections. It’s strange that so much slander and narrative would strain belief in a fictional election, yet barely equate to a week in one of our own.
Moon Ji Young wrote the series, and she makes the cascade of fights, slander, and strategies feed off each other and swing one into the next – all the way highlighting how media buys, journalists, corporate promises, backroom deals, social media, and consumerism can be manipulated into favoring a dangerous candidate. Moreover, she demonstrates how each can be used uniquely against a qualified and proven woman running for office. The politics may be specifically Korean, but even as someone in the U.S. there’s a mountain here that speaks to what our own political landscape has barely endured.
This is the best ensemble of the year for me, and offers some of the most complex and varied roles written for women as they dominate the main cast – as a wealthy matriarch, a daughter with intermittent explosive disorder, another who bides her time, a corporate strategist trying to live up to a Do Hee’s legend, as a heroic activist turned politician, another activist who betrayed her movement, as a journalist, as a researcher, the list goes on.
Through it all, Moon’s writing paints a staggering story of Do Hee pursuing her own accountability and redemption, even if too late. Kim Hee Ae’s Do Hee is a role that’s Shakespearian in its dynamism. She’s detestable, but human in understanding how she became so. She conveys how easy it is for anyone to cross a line and treat others with horror so long as they think they’re right. Her ability to draw our ire and shock even as she draws our empathy, for us to hate her before we want to see her eviscerate the people who taught her and expected her to do hateful things – it’s a complex web that Do Hee herself is undoing.
Kim’s performance shows us how easily someone we can understand as a hero in one minute could be weaponized by those with more money and power the next. Moon’s writing investigates whether someone who’s done something so horrible and irreversible can become accountable and through their actions use what they know about inhabiting and enabling corruption to protect and help others. Neither gives us easy answers, but the questions drive one of the very best political shows I’ve ever seen.
4. Beef
(Netflix) A man tries backing out of his parking space. A woman in a passing SUV blocks him in and lays on the horn. Both think the other’s at fault, and escalate a road rage incident until they’re enacting elaborate plans to ruin the other’s life. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are phenomenal, in turns wearing their pain as raging anger and hiding it to fit into the expectations of their families.
Rage has become each of their coping mechanisms. They’re both products of trauma, and they both see kindness as a shameful act, something to reject aggressively or take advantage of before it takes advantage of them. What makes “Beef” work so profoundly is that it can still find so much in people like this to empathize with and understand. It doesn’t give us every detail of how they got this way, but rather enough of the shape of it for us to understand there is some tether back neither can reach anymore. The pair hate each other because they hate themselves, and recognize someone who’s similar enough that hurting them feels like hurting themselves.
“Beef” is absurdist and satirical, but it treats late-stage capitalism and the implicit racism inherent to assimilation as targets that can be expressed in grounded detail. It saves the conceptual for its metaphysical finale, a gobsmacking left turn that clarifies the habit forming nature of rage as a reaction to pain. “Beef” is a dark comedy at its core, but isn’t afraid of undermining and interrupting itself on behalf of our characters’ journeys. It’s weird, ultimately transcendent, and staggeringly brilliant. (Read the review.)
3. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
(Crunchyroll) Here is one of the best realized pieces of fantasy I’ve ever seen. It covers not the journey to end an ancient evil, but what happens afterwards. As an elf, a 10 year, life-defining journey for her human companions is less than a hundredth of Frieren’s own life. It’s not until later that it becomes clear the connections she made on that journey have lingered. For someone who lives so long, a feeling like that can take years to begin to understand, and at that point those companions she wants to be close to have already started dying.
This is such a beautiful, beautiful contemplation of the meaning of those who’ve passed, housed within a fantasy world where we see day-to-day life – even if the stories themselves are spread out over years and decades. As Frieren takes on an apprentice – a human girl named Fern – and begins a new journey to a place where she might speak with the dead, we see moments both small and large.
One episode is simply about Frieren finding a flower so she can use a spell to grow a field of them. There’s good reason for it, but that reason is deeply personal. Another episode is a raging, breakneck battle, filmed still in that longing way fantasy can uniquely evoke. Yet another episode is about why a battle is over before it’s even begun, a flashback that describes Frieren’s unique relationship to magic.
I love magic in my fantasy, but I hate the way it’s usually portrayed, like Harry Potter and company treating wands like six-shooters in a Western. If you have magic, make it magic. Make it weird, give it its own logic, put us in awe of its beauty and danger. “Frieren” does so over and over again.
The elf herself is a character who feels truly alien to us, who sees the world through such a different lens. If we smile every day, she might smile every 20 and still smile just as often in her life as we do in ours. The different emotional clock is portrayed in a way we get to learn, and begin to appreciate.
The animation…it just feels. It feels off the screen as dappled light and worn pavement stones and the lines of growth on trees. It frames characters as part of their environment. “Frieren” convinces so soundly that its world exists, and it genuinely sparks wonder and awe. In many ways, I still don’t know how “Frieren” does everything it does. It is a piece of magic. Maybe I don’t want to know, because I don’t want its spell to be broken. It transports you like few other things ever have. (Read the review.)
2. The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House
This Japanese slice-of-life series follows two best friends as they leave home. Kiyo and Sumire are on their way to train as geisha, not as the scandalous American cinematic make-believe, but as performers who live together and train seriously in traditional dance and choreography. Sumire is a natural, but no matter how hard she works, Kiyo washes out. She’s not capable of keeping up.
Before she’s sent home, Kiyo asks to cook a meal. The regular cook, or makanai, is injured. And Kiyo can cook. With the old makanai’s permission, Kiyo takes over the role and stays in the house with Sumire. Their paths diverge, but they still walk them together.
There’s very little conflict to “The Makanai”. Characters face decisions, and discuss them, but handle them in realistic, practical fashion. But “The Makanai” finds so much beauty in the ordinary, in the everyday. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a show that’s so calm – not slow, not boring, not unfocused…just calm.
There’s always a conversation, a character we can better understand, an action being taken. The throughline is that these characters take the uncomplicated route – and uncomplicated is no less worthy of attention. Everyday tasks are filmed beautifully, as an art in and of themselves that it is necessary for the camera to appreciate. “The Makanai” communicates a sense of fulfillment, and finds no correct path to it.
There’s a line about Kiyo – and you’ll hear it in the trailer: “That girl is meant to make things instead of being made into something”. Sumire is the one whose talent is being molded, to take what’s already been created and express it through herself. Kiyo’s talent is in creation, and in that creation to express others back to themselves. There are still other characters who have other approaches, and they each find their way to art, and their need to be making it every day in close connection with each other. (Read the review.)
1. The Last of Us
This series is undeniable. I say this as someone who dislikes most post-apocalypse stories. I pretty much only like the wackily off-kilter or quietly tone-heavy stuff. Too many post-apocalypse stories are there to be spectacles, with only a half-hearted wave to deeper themes. “The Last of Us” eschews the spectacle for the personal. It sticks close to its characters, and only shows that wider world in glimpses, encounters that are better avoided. Any view that sees far is too dangerous to exist in for long.
Joel is a traumatized mercenary tasked with transporting a girl named Ellie across the United States. She’s immune to the fungal plague that’s decimated the planet. Getting her to a rumored research base might lead to finding a cure. The way there is uncharted and filled with unknown risks.
“The Last of Us” is about perseverance without hope, of knowing what hope must be because you know the hope-shaped hole that exists, and so acting as you would if you had it, emulating what you’d do if it still survived. Bella Ramsey’s Ellie is the best performance of the year, so utterly realistic in a space that is anything but. To out-act Pedro Pascal at the top of his game is unthinkable, and she does it. The ensemble is superb: Pascal, Anna Torv, Melanie Lynskey, Lamar Johnson, and of course Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
The way “The Last of Us” shapes what we know of these characters, how we anticipate their responses, and appreciate what they’ve sacrificed…it guides us toward developments that we couldn’t have anticipated but fully grasp as they happen. We learn about these characters during their journey, and through the eyes of others’ experiences…but there’s a quieter, subconscious understanding of them we also begin to gather – elements we understand about someone but never need to put into action until things have gone wrong even more than they normally do.
“The Last of Us” gets right what the post-apocalypse genre overwhelmingly gets wrong – it gives us reasons to learn about and deeply understand its characters so that we’re on the journey with them, so that the smallest moment of unexpected quiet is larger than the most ridiculous of spectacles, so that a single word can cave us in more than an entire argument, so that the violence of an internal moment can make us question humanity more than any outward struggle ever could. (Read “The Saddest Series of 2023”.)
The Best of the Unseen
Well, maybe not the best of the unseen so much as the top of my To See list. There are still series from 2023 I’d like to see but haven’t yet – and so can’t put on a list like this. Maybe I would have included them, maybe not. The top on that list are U.S. sci-fi animation “Scavengers Reign”, Korean superhero drama “Moving”, Japanese reincarnation mystery “Oshi No Ko”, German detective story “Dear Child”, British sci-fi mystery “Bodies”, and Indian legal drama “Trial by Fire”.
Also, anything that premiered after Dec. 20 I’m magically making a part of 2024. Korean cosmic horror “Gyeongseong Creature” would’ve made this top 20, but there’s only so much time to watch, write, and finalize a list like this. I reviewed its first several episodes, but I’m still working through the later ones.
Honorable Mentions?
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”, gothic horror anime “Undead Girl Murder Farce”, Korean musical drama “Castaway Diva”, the beautifully edited romance “My Love Story with Yamada-kun”, and British historical mockumentary “Cunk on Earth” are all well worth your time.
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2023 isn’t done yet, we’ve got at least 14 months of Christmas advertising left. But if you want to stay home, avoid that, and your bookshelf is more decorative in nature, we’ve got shows. So many shows.
What’s my metric for Most Anticipated? How much I anticipate it. Let’s not pretend something like this is objective. Smack Kurt Russell and some kaiju into a show together? That’s top 5. Let’s get into it:
The Apothecary Diaries
Maomao is a young pharmacist who’s kidnapped and sold into servitude. She’s determined to keep her head down until she’s freed, but when the emperor’s children grow ill, she can’t help but investigate the cause. This gets her noticed, for better and worse. Her quick wit, curiosity, and medicinal knowledge aid her in investigating a series of mysteries at the imperial court.
The big draw here is the emotive, colorful visuals. Its kingdom is based on Chinese dynasties and…it looks a visual splendor. If the characters and mysteries can hold par, we might be looking at something genuinely captivating.
“The Apothecary Diaries” premieres on Crunchyroll on Oct. 22.
The Worst of Evil
Anything Ji Chang Wook is in is watch-on-arrival. His role as an undercover narcotics officer is a far cry from last year’s singing magician in “The Sound of Magic”, but it’s hardly the first hard-nosed crime role he’s played. Here, his Detective Park Jun Mu is assigned to infiltrate a cartel, only to discover his wife Eui Jung – also a detective – is part of the same operation and seems to have a history with the drug kingpin.
It’s a little weird to see Disney+ getting into violent Korean crime series, but with Netflix’s success and head start bringing Korean productions over to the U.S., every major streaming service is chasing high-profile K-dramas.
“The Worst of Evil” premieres on Disney+ on Sep. 27.
Doctor Who (specials)
Jodie Whittaker’s stint as Doctor Who is the best modern example of a great actor who’s perfect for the role being wasted by an utterly disastrous showrunner. Chris Chibnall gives way to the series original rebooter, Russell T. Davies, who in turn brings back fan favorite David Tennant.
I have opinions on all that, but we’d be here all day. Suffice to say, the series November specials start by correcting Chibnall’s worst mistake and bringing back the best director the show’s ever had in Rachel Talalay. She helmed two of the greatest two hour chunks of series sci-fi in “Heaven Sent/Hell Bent” and “World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls”. If she’s on board, I’m on board.
Regardless of how fans feel about all those names involved, I think we’re all rooting for the show to succeed and nobody minds a few more hours of David Tennant. At its best, “Doctor Who” is a series that helps us recognize strength in kindness, and kindness as complex and multi-faceted. Hopefully, that rises to the fore again.
“Doctor Who” is cagey with its details. We know the specials premiere in November, assumedly on BBC America here in the states and…possibly on Disney+ at some point. I hope they clear it up soon given, you know, it’s only a month away.
Castaway Diva
An aspiring singer named Mok Ha becomes stranded on an island for 15 years. Even after she’s found, she hasn’t given up on her dream of singing, but the transition from isolation into a modern and rapidly changing society is challenging.
This is Park Eun Bin’s follow-up to her lead role in “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”. She’s on a streak of leading some of South Korea’s best reviewed series – “Hot Stove League”, “Do You Like Brahms?”, and “The King’s Affection”, not to mention “Woo”.
“Castaway Diva” is supposed to premiere on Netflix on Oct. 21…but not in South Korea until Oct. 28? That’d be a surprise, so let’s say it premieres in late October. World of information, everybody.
A Murder at the End of the World
It’s been popular to dismiss this sight unseen as “Glass Onion” with Daniel Craig replaced by Gen Z, to which I’m like: Word. It’s supposed to be an insult but…what, Gen Z isn’t supposed to act in anything now? Good luck with that. “Oh no, a new generation is making Agatha Christie-style mysteries! Fetch me yon fainting couch!” Go tell it to Richard Attenborough and Oliver Reed.
This new take finds a murder in an isolated, frozen tundra, with all the suspects trapped for about the length of time it takes to solve the mystery. You’ve got Clive Owen and Alice Braga co-starring, but the real draw for many is showrunners Brit Marling (who also co-stars) and Zal Batmanglij. That’s right, it wasn’t Gen Z. It was Millennials and uh, that generation before them, I always forget – they were behind this the whole time!
Marling and Batmanglij are the minds behind “The OA” and “The East” – the latter still an overlooked (and unfortunately still ahead-of-its-time) masterpiece about the inherent conflicts between organized resistance and egoist movementism.
Marling and Batmanglij make challenging, unexpected work that relies more on picking apart norms and narratives than it does on any particular twist. This tends to make their work unique. Those moments when you realize something as a viewer always feel earned with them. The marketing for “A Murder at the End of the World” makes it look pretty straightforward. Perhaps it is, but the track record of the showrunners says expect something unsettling and subversive.
“A Murder at the End of the World” premieres on Hulu on Nov. 14.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
I’m an enormous fan of the MonsterVerse. It helps that there are only three films instead of 30, but they’ve each gone large in embracing a love of kaiju wrecking the place. But after Godzilla and King Kong have had their bout, what’s left to do?
A family tries to figure out the role they’ve had in Monarch, the secret organization that’s studied and attempted to understand these monsters. Kurt Russell and son Wyatt Russell play versions of the same character during different eras. The stacked cast also features standouts like Christopher Heyerdahl and Mari Yamamoto.
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” premieres on Apple TV+ on Nov. 17.
Spy x Family (season 2)
(The trailer only just released, so no English option yet.)
Loid is a spy who’s trying to keep the peace during a cold war. He needs a family to help maintain his cover. He’s lucky enough to meet Yor, who needs a husband to keep her coworkers from gossiping to the secret police. He’s already adopted a daughter named Anya, with the hope she’ll enroll at an elite private academy a minister’s son attends.
Loid keeps his spycraft a secret. Yor is secretly an assassin. And Anya, secretly being a psychic, is the only one who knows who everyone is. Oh, and they also adopt a dog who can see the future. It all works because we see so much through Anya’s lens, of a child who is alternately in awe of her parents and frightened of their capabilities. She gets embroiled in international espionage but can barely control her careening social life at school. She uses her knowledge like a kid would: to get what she wants, often hilariously ineffectively. And she also feels the pressure of knowing her academic performance is the key to keeping world peace. At the end of the day, every one of these people who must use each other for their own ends to survive – they also deeply yearn for family, for the false act they play out with each other day after day to be real.
I named “Spy x Family” the Most Joyous series of last year. Even if it’s got some competition this year, it’s going to be tough to beat. Many shows are satisfying; this one is fulfilling. Oh, and in addition to its second season, it’s also getting a movie this December (though it’s hard to tell when the film will make it stateside).
“Spy x Family” season 2 premieres on Crunchyroll on Oct. 7. If it follows the first season’s example, Hulu will get it the day after.
Our Flag Means Death (season 2)
One of last year’s surprise hits returns. The pirate comedy adventure tells the star-crossed love story of captains Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard. The first season took a few episodes to find its center, but immediately improved with a director switch and the increasing focus on its romantic core.
The second season has a lot of lines already in the water. We know most of its cast of characters already, so it should hit the ground running much faster. With a three episode premiere and two episodes a week, we’ll also end up getting the entire 8-episode season in a three-week period – perfect for a Halloween binge.
“Our Flag Means Death” season 2 premieres on Max (formerly HBO Max) on Oct. 5.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
The elven mage Frieren spends 10 years defeating a Demon King and restoring peace in the world. For her, it’s the blink of an eye. For her human and dwarven compatriots, the adventure defines their lives. She returns 50 years later to see her friends, only to witness the end of their days. Regretting missed time she can’t get back, she takes the adopted daughter of one of her friends on an adventure to the resting place of souls, where she might see a close friend one last time.
The trailer already hits pretty hard and I don’t even know these characters yet. With recent series like “Sonny Boy” and “My Love Story with Yamada-kun”, Madhouse is a studio that’s proven itself willing to create patient, cinematic stories that take real time understanding and empathizing with their characters.
“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” premieres on Crunchyroll on Sep. 29.
Gyeongseong Creature
Han So Hee’s been on my radar since her jaw dropping work on “My Name”. She gave one of the best dramatic performances of 2021, and ably performed some of the most creative fight choreography of the past several years. In “Gyeongseong Creature”, she plays a todugun, someone who searches for missing people. Set in 1945, she’s had ample work doing this during the Japanese occupation of Korea. When a string of stranger disappearances start taking place, she teams up with a wealthy benefactor to investigate.
A period mystery with some fight choreo is already intriguing enough, but “Gyeongseong Creature” promises something even darker. Its English description drops the most beautiful three-word phrase we’ve got: historical sci-fi horror.
“Gyeongseong Creature” premieres on Netflix on Dec. 22.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 