The Worst TV of 2023

Many words spilled on social media last week when the editor-in-chief of Collider spoke out against “Worst Of” lists, saying that people work hard on projects. Who are we, as critics, to crush their dreams with negative reviews and lists? But that’s our job! And it’s especially true when it comes to TV, whose whole point is to be bad, mass-produced garbage. The fact that any good shows appear at all is a modern miracle, a living example of the “million monkeys with a million typewriters” adage. Almost everything that appears on TV is bad, but some of it is egregiously bad. Today four of our critics highlight shows that tried to be good and fail, cynical cash grabs, and some stuff that never had a prayer. Enjoy! Worst Of lists are delicious for the holidays.

Omar Gallaga

I’m a Virgo – The director of “Sorry to Bother You,” Boots Riley, took Amazon’s money to make a deeply anti-capitalist statement wrapped in a story about a 13-foot-tall teen in Oakland, California, on Prime Video. A promising start devolved into a muddled, clunky mess about superheroes that even the great Walton Goggins couldn’t save.

Frasier – Some revivals of beloved old TV franchises work (“Twin Peaks: The Return,” “One Day at a Time”), some really don’t. This one, which jettisoned most of the cast of the NBC sitcom to focus on Kelsey Grammer’s titular talk-show host returning to Boston, was corny, with little sense of why the original worked. The rehash curdled by its first episode on Paramount+.

We Have a Ghost – Netflix in particular shoveled a lot of mediocre movies into 2023 and this misfire, featuring Anthony Mackie and “Stranger Things” star David Harbour, was a good example of its film-producing problems. Neither funny nor scary nor even fun in the least, this mash of a supernatural family film wasted the talents of, among many, costars Tig Notaro and Jennifer Coolidge.

The Other Two – Seasons 1 and 2 of this Max comedy, about older siblings of a Justin Bieber-like pop-culture sensations, would have easily been in their respective years’ top 10 best TV lists. But this final season, in which Helene Yorke and Drew Tarver’s characters finally find success in Hollywood, turned mean and cynical, getting less funny as is went, despite great supporting work from Molly Shannon, Ken Marino, Wanda Sykes and the brilliant Josh Segarra. Revelations that the show’s creators were the subject of HR complaints weren’t so surprising after this sour season of TV.

Scott Gold

The Witcher Season 3–It’s almost unfathomable how hard you have to work to spoil a series with such promise and with a franchise fanbase as loyal and loving as The Witcher, but somehow Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and her team at Netflix did exactly that. As I wrote, the third season was so bad it was not just forgettable, but also somehow both eye-rollingly corny and confusing at the same time. It proved such a disappointment, they even lost Henry Cavill, the sole remaining reason to watch the series, and when Superman decides to bow out because you’re not being fair to the source material, you know you have problems, and we all saw it. There will be more seasons of The Witcher, with Liam Hemsworth taking over the role of Geralt of Rivia, but there’s no way they’ll capture the magic of that first exciting season. I’m calling it here: Throw no more coins to your witcher, friends.

The Mandalorian: Guns for Hire–Overall, the third season of The Mandalorian was fun and exciting, maybe not as much as the previous installments, but it’s still a great series and I’ll continue tuning in. That said, one episode was a disaster. You know the one I’m talking about: it featured Jack Black and Lizzo giving Mando yet another forgettable fetch quest. It was a pandering, forgettable episode that should result in a stern slap on the wrist for Favreau and Filloni, whose work in the Disney Star Wars universe has so far been a massive success. I just pray it was a harsh learning lesson, and we’ll all move on and pretend that it never happened. You know, like the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Secret Invasion–I’m sure the decision for the MCU to change tack from its usual superhero shenanigans to a glum, John Le Carre cold war spy thriller-style series was a calculated one, but they lost big on this bet. I’m normally a Marvel fanboy who gleefully devours every movie and series that they heap on our plates (I actually enjoyed She-Hulk), but Secret Invasion lost me, and I bowed out after three or four episodes. Listen, Marvel, I know you’re under a lot of pressure to churn out content, and I’m also sure your writers and producers are likewise trying to keep things from getting stale. But you went too far in the opposite direction this time, I’m sad to say. I still believe in you, but until “Daredevil: Born Again” airs, I’m going to be a picky Marvel eater from here on out.

Neal Pollack

Bobby’s Triple Threat–So many TV cooking competitions, like Top Chef, Chopped, Master Chef, and Hell’s Kitchen, skate by on their history and legacy. You can still watch them while enjoying a sandwich. But most new cooking competitions are abysmal. The Food Network may have scraped the bottom of the wine barrel this season with Bobby’s Triple Threat, which takes place in front of a live studio audience in a fake sort-of bachelor’s lounge. And Bobby Flay doesn’t even cook. He just chills out drinking martinis, while a team of “titans” comprised of Brooke Williamson, Michael Voltaggio, and Tiffany Derry, who were once breakout stars of Top Chef but have slowly devolved into mediocre TV personalities, shells of themselves who are climbing the celebrity TV chef ladder by virtue of being chefs on TV. The competition has no stakes. Many of the people the “titans” compete against are other wanna-be titans who are also climbing the celebrity chef ladder. Who cares if Michael Voltaggio can outcook Michael Symon? The cheesy format lacks tension, and the cooking, even by these modern masters, seems tired.

I understand why the chefs do it; it’s easier and more reliably lucrative than running a restaurant. But it should be a sign that Padma Lakshmi has decided to stop hosting Top Chef after 20 seasons. When she started (in the second season), TV cooking competitions were still thrilling and fresh. Now, at best, they are formulaic time-passers, their job of creating a vast multiverse of bland celebrity chefs complete.

Night Court and That 90s Show–My colleague Omar Gallaga rightly points out the disastrous Frasier reboot above as one of the year’s worst shows. But at least the original show was an all-time sitcom classic. You can’t really argue that about Night Court and that 70s Show, which received odd refurbishings on NBC and Netflix respectively. There’s no real natural audience for these reboots except for shut-ins who are saying “oh yeah, I used to watch that.” The shows bring back a few veterans from the original to remind us that we watched TV when we were younger. But both felt extremely dated and retrograde, with crummy laugh tracks backing the relentlessly unfunny scripts and broad, hammy acting. There is enough crappy new TV. We don’t need crappier versions of crappy old TV.

Secret Invasion–As Scott Gold said above, this Disney+ Marvel series was a turgid disappointment. Despite being putatively based on one of the best comic superhero storylines of all time, and despite the fact that Samuel L. Jackson was the lead actor, Secret Invasion underwhelmed from the beginning. Its utter humorlessness didn’t exactly get a boost from grim visual styling, and Emilia Clarke double-torpedoed the whole enterprise with a charisma-vacuuming turn as a shapeshifting alien who apparently cannot develop a personality in any form. The MCU needs to purge itself of a lot more than Jonathan Majors.

Squid Game: The Challenge–I will admit that I watched every episode of this reality-show re-enactment of the legendary Squid Game over the course of three very late nights, consuming the content like a bag of tortilla chips. It was strangely addictive, like any well-crafted reality show. But I ended the run feeling soiled and manipulated. This was a strange, cynical, antiseptic, and artificial-feeling recreation, full of sobbing, sleep-deprived Instagram influencers “loving” and hugging while trying to betray one another to win a huge amount of money. The darkest moment in reality TV history since “Married By America” or maybe “Joe Millionaire.”

William Schwartz

Hunters–In theory, you’d think that a show about Nazi hunting in the seventies that stars Al Pacino in a leading role would be a bigger deal. In practice, it’s easy enough to see why Amazon Prime buried the second season of Hunters until nearly three years after the first one. There’s a glimmer of a good idea of exploring why Nazi hunting even used to be controversial that silly creative decisions consistently undermine. Why anyone thought the world needed girlboss Eva Braun, I doubt we’ll ever really know.

Citadel–Despite Hunters being such a disaster, Amazon Prime still decided that David Weil was the point man for Citadel, the streaming platform’s ambitious, multinational project that aimed to become the new brand name in Bourne-style spy series. In the end, Citadel struggled to have enough halfway decent plot to fill in a six-episode order. And supposedly the interconnected Citadel project is still going forward despite the fact that I fully expect plenty of people reading this article may well have never even heard of this $300 million failure.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel–Not all shows start out bad. Some of them begin strong enough that they can coast on that goodwill just about indefinitely. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s genuinely inventive premise of a 50-era comedienne trying to hit the big time finally just runs out of ideas entirely in the fifth season, with flash-forward sequences hinting at great plot arcs nobody could bother to actually write since depicting that Mrs. Maisel actually succeeded, as opposed to just engaging in witty banter, was a task beyond the screenwriters. We’ll have to forgive younger generations for not understanding why the climax is just Mrs. Maisel appearing on a late night talk show-a plot hook that the show simultaneously over and underexplains.

Strange Planet–It might not be fair to say that Strange Planet is the worst animated show of the year, really, or even the worst one on Apple+ (apparently they just canceled Central Park ). But the show’s merch-friendly blue aliens whose only apparent gimmick is using unusual words to describe mundane everyday life was remarkable for feeling pointless even in the wasteland of edgy adult animated television. The joke appears to be that adult animation done ironically just reverts back to normal situation comedy. This would almost be an interesting observation in a stand-up routine. It’s most definitely not a premise a whole show can rest on.

All the Light We Cannot See–With Hunters opening the year and All the Light We Cannot See closing, prestige television only allows us to know one thing about the Nazis–that they were bad. Could a screen adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s book have managed to be good if it had shown a little more nuance, a little more love of science, a little more appreciation for how life in a war zone is tremendously distressing to the point that all anyone on any side can do is rely very heavily on coping mechanisms? Maybe. But I wouldn’t have wanted to risk the screentime such an attempt would require.