Critics’ Conversation: In the Shadow of ‘Succession,’ a TV Spring Full of Risks and Rewards

Daniel Fienberg and Angie Han
·11 min read
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DANIEL FIENBERG: It’s hard to tell the story of Spring TV in 2023 without discussing HBO’s Succession and Barry, as well as Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso. Those three shows, two definitely finished and one seemingly coming to an end, represented four of the last six Emmy wins for outstanding drama and comedy series, as well as many nominations for acting, writing and directing. With their shocking deaths, wild deviations in tone and, in the case of Ted Lasso, expanded episode running times, they’ve dominated social media and water cooler conversations since March.

That’s why we’re not going to focus on them here. There’s more to TV than Barry, Succession and Ted Lasso — or at least HBO and Apple hope there is after the upcoming awards season concludes.

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Even not counting the holy trinity of the spring, there were buzzy returning shows — FXX’s Dave! Showtime’s Yellowjackets! — the best new Netflix shows in years, comedy momentum building for Freevee, some big and expensive swings from Amazon and Apple, and Peacock rolling out one of the strangest shows in recent memory.

ANGIE HAN: TV might not be ending with Succession, Barry and Ted Lasso, but as ever, trying to garner the kind of acclaim and attention those shows have captured is very, very difficult — and this spring’s been littered with shows that sounded like safe bets on paper, but landed with a thud.

Like Amazon’s Daisy Jones & The Six, which came armed with an expensive marketing campaign, but couldn’t live up to either the freewheeling rock ‘n’ roll energy of its 1970s Sunset Strip setting or the playfulness of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s beloved novel. (For that matter, it also couldn’t deliver on music good enough to live up to the fictional band’s reputation as a Fleetwood Mac-level success.) Or its adaptation of The Power, which too often fell back on feminist cliches that would’ve felt dated in 2016, when Naomi Alderman’s book came out.

You’d think Hulu’s Saint X and Apple TV+’s The Last Thing He Told Me should have been able to tap into TV’s appetite for disappearing-white-people mysteries — but the former struggled to recreate the subversion and specificity that made Alexis Schaitkin’s novel so singular, and the latter was better at serving up Bay Area real-estate porn than actual suspense.

That’s not to say making shows based on books is an inherently bad idea, obviously. Hulu’s Cheryl Strayed adaptation Tiny Beautiful Things won me over with its tenderness, compassion and great performances by Kathryn Hahn, Merritt Wever and Sarah Pidgeon. And I thought Disney+’s American Born Chinese did an excellent job of springboarding off Gene Luen Yang’s book to deliver something new and modern (if also a tad Marvel-y for my taste) for 2023.

But clearly, great source material doesn’t always translate into excellent adaptations. And that’s not even getting into all the other so-so based-on-previous-IP shows this spring, like Paramount+’s Fatal Attraction reboot or Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies …

FIENBERG: With IP, there’s always a question of “So what does the title we’re mining even mean to anybody?” Like, if Apple TV+ adapts Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire, but eliminates the time period and most of the distinctive style, leaving only the uninspired murder mystery from a book I’d wager very few people even finished, what’s the point? Or if we’re treated to dueling semi-adaptations of True Lies — CBS’ True Lies and Netflix’s FUBAR — one that gets to use the title and one that actually stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, does it turn out that the “brand” is the title or the former governor of California? And does it matter that neither show really captured the scope or humor of the James Cameron film? At least Max’s — speaking of a company not understanding which part of a name is the “brand” — Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai — delivered cute mogwai and chaotic gremlins.

Every once in a while, of course, somebody takes a title and does something truly interesting with it. Dead Ringers, another Amazon adaptation, delivered the body horror of the David Cronenberg film, as well as offering Rachel Weisz possibly the best role of her career, but creator Alice Birch also had totally new and contemporary things to say about female reproductive health and the birth industrial complex. And credit to two other respectable recent adaptations: Netflix’s The Night Agent for at least delivering the basic thrills of a pulpy beach read and AMC’s Lucky Hank for giving Bob Odenkirk a good Better Call Saul follow-up role.

Everybody wants a franchise, and intellectual property feels like the way to generate a franchise — unless you’re Citadel, which put untold zillions of dollars into a flashy espionage thriller that was simultaneously “original” and completely generic. Thanks in no small part to stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden, Citadel seems to be finding an international audience. Allegedly. And that’s all Amazon ever wanted.

Fortunately, not all of this spring’s originals were generic.

HAN: No, and some of the season’s more unusual offerings came from two platforms that, as recently as six months ago, felt like distant also-rans in the streaming wars. Peacock continued its hot streak with Mrs. Davis, a series that railed against the unoriginality of AI by taking in every cliché imaginable and turning them into something so sublimely bananas that not even the most jaded TV critic could have seen it coming.

Meanwhile, Bupkis took another very familiar subject — Pete Davidson’s biography — and filtered it through a mélange of tones, styles and themes to mostly interesting, sometimes heartrending effect.

Then there’s Freevee, which in Jury Duty finally had a breakout big enough to inspire audiences to figure out what exactly Freevee is. Thanks to its apparent sweetheart of an unwitting lead, Ronald Gladden, the scripted-reality-comedy hybrid turned out to be much more heartwarming than you’d guess from its Truman Show-ish premise (though I’ll admit to still being a little bit queasy about its ethics). Hopefully, the new Freevee viewers will also stick around for Primo, which isn’t reinventing any wheels but stands up as a very warm and funny execution of the family sitcom.

Two of the spring’s most talked-about titles came from more established streamers. I don’t know that Amazon’s Swarm had as much to stay about stan culture or mental illness as it seemed to think it did. But it oozed style, featured a barnburner of a star turn from Dominique Fishback and sparked lots of conversation — much of it incisive (critiques of the show’s dehumanization of its Black female lead) and some of it less so (pearl-clutching over Chloe Bailey’s sex scene).

Over on Netflix, Beef enthralled me with its combination of escalating twists, outrageous comedy and eventually disarming sense of grace — not to mention its tremendous cast, including a rarely-better Ali Wong and Steven Yeun. Which made it all the more disappointing when my enthusiasm was later dampened by the controversy over disturbing remarks by costar David Choe, and the ensuing snippy non-apology by its principals. Would that the show had taken more of its own lessons to heart.

FIENBERG: I feel like it’s important to confront the problems with David Choe — and the Beef creative team’s response — head-on so that everyone can then recall how remarkable Wong and Yeun are in the show, and how cogent and frequently dazzling creator Lee Sung Jin’s perspective is. The whiplash of tones — and emotional responses — produced by the series, from hilarious to viscerally uncomfortable to playfully surreal, is just too impressive for it all to get lost in controversy, no matter how legitimate.

As for Mrs. Davis, originality of the kind it aspires to is such a glorious thing that I will happily wave a flag for what creators Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof attempted, even if what the show achieved fell far short for me. This is both the best and worst show ever made about a nun married to Jesus and a failed rodeo cowboy attempting to bring down a globally dominant artificial intelligence algorithm by looking for the Holy Grail. I found its chaotic innovation utterly astonishing and its home stretch utterly hollow, and I would rather watch 50 shows like Mrs. Davis than a Citadel.

The same is true of Swarm. Was Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s horror comedy hugely perceptive about 21st-century celebrity and the simultaneously nourishing and toxic space of social media fandom? I’m not sure. But was Fishback’s performance, which veered from funny childlike innocence to a chilling portrait of dehumanized psychopathy, astonishing and astonishingly unpredictable from the first frame to the last? Absolutely.

But as you say, you don’t need to be daring and boundary-breaking to be “original.” Primo is an appealing family comedy, nothing more and nothing less. But in creator Shea Serrano’s hands, it has a wonderful specificity, and the stars — including Christina Vidal, Jonathan Medina and Johnny Rey Diaz — are so likable and funny that the show has endless room to grow.

A great ensemble, led by Rob Lowe and Sian Clifford, plus co-creator Victor Fresco’s twisted approach to corporate satire, made Netflix’s Unstable both completely familiar and maybe the spring’s funniest new show. Also on Netflix, The Diplomat hailed from The West Wing and Homeland veteran Debora Cahn and it felt like a hybrid of those shows. But when you have fairly smart writing and stars like Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, it’s enjoyable enough to see formula delivered with proficiency. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel if you give viewers a comfortable ride.

Did anything else stand out for you this spring? Or are you burning to discard the initial challenge established by this conversation and dive into Succession, Barry and Ted Lasso? Or even something like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, once incredibly buzzy and acclaimed and now concluding as a bit of an afterthought? Or Happy Valley, a magnificent series wrapping after three taut seasons of brilliantly acted small-town British policing, but left a hair marginalized by its strange triple — Acorn TV, AMC+ and BBC America — platform?

HAN: I am so glad you mentioned Unstable, because I don’t think the posters that were just a giant closeup of Rob Lowe and his son were up to the task of getting out just how hilarious this show is, and how snappy the cast chemistry is. I am pretty much always looking for something to fill the Better Off Ted-shaped hole in my heart, and what better than the new series from the guy (Fresco) who actually made Better Off Ted?

Likewise, I’m someone who’ll stop to watch 2014’s Neighbors and its sequel any time I find them on cable, so I was delighted to see that Apple TV+’s buddy comedy Platonic plays off the easy, breezy chemistry between Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne and director Nicholas Stoller. (Even if I am deeply skeptical of the premise that two people from opposite ends of L.A. could ever really be friends.)

Max’s Clone High isn’t an original — technically, it’s the second season of a show previously cancelled in 2004 — but it feels as fresh and fun as anything else this year, thanks to some smart updates. HBO’s Rain Dogs is heartbreaking as often as it is funny, but what a wonderfully humane portrait of a family on the fringes. I found Apple TV+’s High Desert to be an acquired taste, but eventually warmed to its sun-baked shagginess and vivid lead characters (played by Patricia Arquette, Rupert Fried, Brad Garrett and more).

Succession, Barry and Ted Lasso may have a way of sucking up all the air in the room. And I get it: I’ll miss watching them when they’re gone (well, maybe less so Lasso after this disastrous season) and I’ll certainly miss dissecting them. But I think you and I have proven here that there’s so much more exciting, ambitious, unique TV to be discovered outside that trio — and I can’t wait to see what shows are going to capture our conversations this summer!

A version of this story first appeared in the May 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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