July is almost here, meaning that we’ve almost reached the halfway point of the year. A good time, then, to press pause on all the entertainment whizzing towards us week by week and instead look back at the best culture of the year so far. The Guardian’s arts desk have their own definitive lists for TV shows, films, albums, games and podcasts, and I’ve also picked five of my favourite TV shows, albums, films and podcasts of 2023, along with some honourable mentions. Read on for these, plus the best fiction and nonfiction releases according to books commissioning editor Lucy Knight, and games editor Keza MacDonald’s favourite shoot ’em-ups, puzzle games and more.
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TV
First things first: this has been a stonking year of television already. Winnowing down this list to five shows feels very harsh on the close-to-classics that have been relegated to the honourable mentions corner. But press on we must, and it’s impossible to start anywhere other than Succession (Now in the UK, HBO elsewhere), whose final season was the biggest weekly TV event since the last outing of Game of Thrones. Crucially (and unlike GoT), it managed to stick the landing, too. Beef (Netflix) was the year’s other outstanding US drama-comedy, balancing a thoughtful character study with loopy humour sometimes in the same scene.
It seems so long ago now but the final season of Happy Valley (BBC iPlayer) was the equivalent of a bracing splash into freezing cold water at the start of the year, anchored by another great performance from Sarah Lancashire as no-nonsense Yorkshire cop Catherine Cawood. The best TV documentary, meanwhile, was the astounding Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (BBC iPlayer), surely the most definitive account of the Troubles ever broadcast. And a word for the great comedy Party Down (Lionsgate+), a revival of a long-cancelled series that managed to improve on the original.
Honourable mentions Barry (see, I told you this was going to seem harsh!); The Last of Us; I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson; Jury Duty; Poker Face.
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Albums
The record that I have listened to more than any other – and by quite some distance – is Dead Meat by the Tubs, an utterly addictive collection of 80s jangle and Richard and Linda Thompson-inspired tunes with brilliantly acid-tongued lyrics. Every song is an earworm. Almost as addictive is Everything Harmony, the new LP from the Lemon Twigs, who are back older and wiser with a Rundgren/Newman/Nilsson/James Taylor-inspired suite of chamber pop bangers. (Ghost Run Free is another track lodged firmly in my frontal lobe.)
The debut album from Yaeji (pictured above), With a Hammer, is a taste of the future and the recent past, knitting together everything from drum‘n’bass to 90s alt-rock to hyperpop to create the year’s most original album. Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? by McKinley Dickson was a sprawling, hyper-literary jazz-rap album that made an equally energising listen. And I’ve had a lot of fun with MSPAINT’s joyously rowdy “hardcore punk without the guitars” LP, Post-American.
Honourable mentions Militarie Gun – Life Under the Gun; Shame – Food for Worms; Speakers Corner Quartet – Further Out Than the Edge; 100 Gecs – 10,000 Gecs; Geese – 3D Country
Plus five great songs (from bands who haven’t already been mentioned) Initiate – Alone at the Bottom; Knower – I’m the President; Wednesday – Chosen to Deserve; Bar Italia – Nurse!; Genesis Owusu – Leaving the Light
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Films
In contrast to TV, film has started a little slowly in 2023, with cinemas clogged up with underwhelming blockbusters and the best arthouse releases still to come in the autumn. Still, there were gems dotted about: Todd Field’s Cate Blanchett-starring Tár is the knottiest, eeriest, most gripping and indeed best film of the year so far, while Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is surely the most visually ravishing and dazzlingly inventive.
The inverse of Spider-Verse’s maximalism was Lukas Dhont’s stark Close, a heartbreaking tale of an early-teen friendship gone awry, while How to Blow Up a Pipeline provided scrappy, tense thrills and truly urgent subject matter. And the best big-screen documentary of the past six months was All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which managed to tell in parallel artist Nan Goldin’s astonishing life story and her fight against the Sackler family.
Honourable mentions The Eight Mountains; Air; Rye Lane; The Fabelmans; Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
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Podcasts
The world of podcasting is ever-expanding and endlessly varied, meaning that narrowing it down into a list of five seems a clown’s game; I’m aware that there are plenty of strands of podcasting – comedy, true crime, celebrity natter-alongs – that you could delve into. These, then, are merely five that I’ve enjoyed this year: for more extensive coverage, do sign up to the Guardian’s Hear Here newsletter. The podcast I was most wowed by was Holy Week, the Atlantic’s beautifully produced account of the seven days of tumult that followed Martin Luther King’s death. Audible’s Think Twice (£) was another impressive effort from Leon Neyfakh, this time partnering with cultural commentator Jay Smooth for a thoughtful look at how we should process Michael Jackson’s legacy. And The Debutante (also Audible, £) was another Jon Ronson gripper, this time telling the story of an oil heiress turned neo-Nazi turned informant.
Plus, two podcasts that I’ve mentioned plenty of times before continued to impress: fashion pod Articles of Interest again fascinated with tales of a hastily assembled Black fashion museum and the factory fire that cast a pall over the industry; and Bill Simmons-led pod The Rewatchables continued to entertain with goofy dissections of movies as diverse as Alien, The Last Days of Disco and Dumb and Dumber (that last episode featuring Jennifer Lawrence).
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Games
This year started strong in video games – though two of the best offerings from the early months, Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4, were actually remakes of games that are a couple of decades old. Thankfully, there’s been plenty of new games to choose from: Humanity is a fascinating allegorical puzzle game about the wisdom of crowds, where you play a luminescent shiba inu, while Hi-Fi Rush is an exuberant, cartoonish surprise-release action game where you whack robots with a guitar to the beat of Nine Inch Nails. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is the best Star Wars game in many years, offering juicy lightsaber battles staged in eye-rubbingly beautiful planetary locales.
Really, though, 2023 belongs to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Whether you’re earnestly trying to track down Princess Zelda and defeat Ganondorf or getting distracted cooking up apple pie and strapping leaf-people to self-built rocket-powered sleds and yeeting them off a mountain, you are always having fun in this astonishingly creative, flexible and intellectually satisfying adventure. Keza MacDonald
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Books
This year, Bret Easton Ellis is back with what our reviewer called his “strongest novel since the 90s”. The Shards, the American Psycho author’s first novel in 13 years, is an autofictional tale that takes us back to 80s LA, where Bret is finishing high school and a serial killer is on the loose. For something a little less dark and violent, try the excellent Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which lives up to its title with ambition and panache, or Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, a funny, sexy and slightly bizarre novel about a therapist’s transcriptionist.
As for nonfiction, Chinese British writer Xiaolu Guo’s memoir Radical looks at language, desire and freedom in a highly original way, and Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott J Shapiro is a fascinating – if slightly terrifying – study of cybercrime. For more recommendations from the first half of 2023 check out our guide to 50 brilliant books to read this summer. Lucy Knight
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