I watch way too much TV sometimes binge-watching a show all the way through the night. Thanks to the blessing and curse of a multitude of streaming options there is always a wealth of content.
The rules of what gets into each monthly list are simple. It needs to be a TV show, limited or otherwise, any particular season and I have to have finished watching it in the month. This does mean for shows that are doing weekly releases I may have started watching some time ago.
The List
The list of shows ranked for February 2023 are: –
The idea is to rank what I’ve watched per month and then do some sort of ranking at the end of the year.
The Last of Us
There are four games that have truly impacted me with their narrative: The Last of Us, God of War, Until Dawn and Mass Effect (the trilogy). Each of these games delivers something that I believe, in their own way, delivers a narrative that rivals some, if not a lot, of other media. Despite this, The Last of Us sits at the top as it delivered a story that by the time I got to the end of it I didn’t just feel it was emotional and engaging it also registered as profound.
I’ve discussed what the TV adaption does well but the truth is it does everything impeccably. The best element to focus on as it is unique to this show is how it’s a masterwork of adaption. The Last of Us will stand as one of the best adaptations in TV or Film. Not just the best videogame adaptation, which it is by a ludicrous margin, but it’s up there with any adaptation, period.
Each week The Last of Us traumatised its audience. It’s obvious this is true just by watching the reaction videos. The show is so good that it even transformed reaction videos. They ceased to become about sensationalism and shock and about the shared emotion of an experience (to be fair Andor also contributed to this journey). People have stopped watching shows for less. Despite this weekly heartfelt trauma and emotion, you continued watching because it never felt truly depressing and that’s because the development of the relationship between Joel and Ellie was forged in these emotional fires and that was something worth going through the pain for. It had layers of beauty within the trauma of the experience.
The TV show delivers everything the game does and more. The Last of Us is a masterpiece. I doubt anything is going to unseat it as the best thing I will have watched this year despite the fact we’re not out of the first quarter.
Everyone should watch The Last of Us it is literally peak TV of peak TV.
1923
I’m a fan of this whole neo-Western thing that Paramount+ has going on, which essentially means it’s something Taylor Sheridan has going on. I’ve enjoyed Yellowstone, but it’s gone from being great to comfortably average, while 1883 was a masterpiece.
I really enjoyed 1923 but it does feel like two different shows which are going to merge at some point.
The story on the Yellowstone ranch, albeit in the 20’s is fascinating. It has Harrison Ford and Hellen Mirren staring so you can’t go far wrong, but the show also does something the Yellow-stone verse does very well, it tells the story of changing times. In this case, it is the transformation of the US by technology. The arrival of instant communication, prevalent electricity, and the automobile along with the first true arrival of the city. It’s fascinating stuff as well as the drama of the characters.
The second half of the show is a sort of grand, sweeping romance between the adventurer and hunter Spencer Dutton and his British love Alexandria. I loved this part of the show. It painted an interesting picture of that part of history. It has a lot of globe-trotting and moments of adventure. Yeah, they profess their love a bit too often but I’ve liked it.
I am looking forward to when the stories merge though.
It is another solid entry into the whole Taylor-verse thing that is going on. A lot of people call them ‘red state’ shows but I don’t see them that way. I don’t believe the shows are ‘Conservative Porn’ in any shape at all. The characters in the show have a certain outlook that could be described as holding onto the past but they truly do that around things that ARE worth saving and they quite often recognise their own failings in doing this.
What they really are is a return to a certain type of storytelling that some people like to think we’ve moved beyond but there is a bit of resurgence on as it’s proving very successful.
Yellowjackets
Yellowjackets is one of those shows I kept hearing about but had never got around to watching. The premise is an all-girl soccer team are flying to an important match and the plane crashes in the mountains and they descend into cannibalism and two warring factions. The story unfolds in the past, which has the teen girls surviving in the mountains, and in the present with those who survived as adults.
I’d tried once and just couldn’t get into it. Since I have Paramount+ and it kept being recommended to me I fatalistically tried again this month expecting it to fall away like last time.
I got to the end. Okay, for about 50% of it, I’d say I was ‘interested enough’ and that was about it but then it started to click as to the type of shows I was watching.
As I got to the end I found myself genuinely interested in the teen, survival and horror drama mix that the show concocts. The story in the mountains is always fascinating and I’m really wanting to see them descend Lord of the Flies style. I also like how the story in the future is unfolding and how the events have impacted them both psychologically and in some minor horror twists.
I’m going to give season two a go but I’m going to wait until I can binge it.
You
Sometimes a series should quit while it’s ahead. If the fourth series of You tells us anything it’s that just as great TV shows can be cut short due to the Netflix algorithm other shows can live longer than they should.
Apparently, I’m in the minority on You series four as Rotten Tomatoes has it at a 95% Tomatometer score and an audience score of 62%. I don’t get it. I couldn’t even get through the series. After slogging through the first part I got someway through the second episode of the second part and just decided it was junk.
Ultimately, I just didn’t care about what was going on.
It turned it into some sort of ham-fisted commentary on the rich alongside some weird attempt to turn our protagonist into one of those anti-hero detectives and I really hate those he’s a serial killer nut-job but he’s sort of a good guy because the other people are worse shows.
You was a great show when it was dealing with Joe as a stalker and then dealing with Joe meeting his match in Love during seasons two and three. It then lost its whole reason to exist.
And, Finally…
Is it possible I’ve seen the best TV series of the year in Q1 of the year? I think it’s entirely possible. I just can’t say enough how great The Last of Us is. I just find it hard to describe how enthralling the show was and how much of a shared experience it was, albeit via reaction videos. It harkened back to a different era of TV when more people watched more stuff at the same time.
Another amazing thing that is continuing and will land in April is Star Trek: Picard season three which is continuing to be awesome. I’ll also give you some end of Q1 spoilers for the year? At the moment, the top 5 shows of the year consist of 4 HBO shows and one Paramount+ show.