In advance of my 2022-2023 television top ten list (I go by the Emmy eligibility calendar, because it's easier), I want to talk about some of the shows I didn't watch this year, for various reasons. There are far, far more shows out there than anyone can possibly keep up with, so this is not a remotely exhaustive list. The titles below are only the most high profile ones that I want to talk about why I skipped.
I reserve the right to revisit these choices in the future, but I still haven't seen anything from any previous list.
"Succession" - I'm finally giving up on ever starting this. There's been a boost in the show's popularity for its final season, but I can't bring myself to spend nearly forty hours watching these terrible people destroy each other for power, no matter how entertaining they are. The clips and catch-up summaries I've seen have only cemented that the Roy family are simply too infuriating for me to take.
"Yellowstone" - This includes all the spinoffs. I'm glad that Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner have such a big win, but the more I read about the show the more it's clear that I'm not the target audience. Westerns were always a challenge for me, and frontier narratives even moreso. I might have fun picking apart the show's old fashioned worldview, but there are simply too many other options for me to bother.
"Cunk on Earth" - I've seen the Philomena Cunk character a few times in some of Charlie Brooker's other shows, and I don't think I need to see one built around her. I have a pretty low tolerance for comedians playing dumbell characters, and I'm not getting any novel vibes from Cunk. The subject matter actually looks like a lot of fun otherwise - visiting historical sites and talking to various experts. Too bad.
"Daisy Jones & The Six" - I like Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, but music biopics, even fake ones, are pretty rough for me. I recently watched all of Danny Boyle's "Pistol," which was about a real rock band from the same period, so I think I've hit my quota for this genre anyway. This is the show on this list I feel guiltiest about skipping, however, because it's a riskier project and aimed at an underserved audience.
"Jury Duty" - The combination of a reality show with a sitcom format reportedly got some very good results, but this just isn't the kind of thing I enjoy. Frankly, a whole series where everyone is fake except for the one guy who's being "Truman Show" -ed sounds bizarre, and not in a good way. I'd be way more interested in watching a documentary about how this project was done than the actual show itself.
"White House Plumbers" - I'd probably be watching this for the star-studded cast if it weren't for the fact that "Gaslight" got to the Watergate scandal first, with an even better cast last year. I got really burned out on all those prestige miniseries in the spring of '22, so I've been cutting back. "Love & Death" is another one I'm on the fence about skipping, which covers the same events as last year's "Candy."
"Dahmer" - Finally, I'm generally a true crime fan, and I like a lot of the people involved in this project, but I don't think I need to see Ryan Murphy's take on Jeffrey Dahmer. If this were a movie, maybe it would have been more palatable, but ten episodes is a lot. I like the idea of a macroscopic approach, looking at systemic failures as well as Dahmer's sociopathy, but the results were reportedly mixed.
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