Séamas O'Reilly: Presenting the first annual Séamie Awards for telly excellence

So, this being year’s end, I’ve taken it upon myself to conceive a brave new series of gongs to restore small screen achievements to their rightful place in the cultural firmament.

I give you: the new Gold Standard in TV appreciation, The First Annual Séamie Awards.

Outstanding Achievement in Me Forgetting Everything That Happened in the Last Series

An easy win here for S3 of Netflix’s The Witcher, whose last two seasons may as well have been pumped into my brain via chloroform. 

I genuinely could not get through a single scene without googling who everyone was, or what was going on, despite having seen every previous episode. 

Bonus mention for Amazon’s mammothly expensive LOTR prequel, The Ring of Power, which I fully expect to take next year’s crown. 

I watched every single episode and just had to look up what it was called and I’m still not sure.

Best Extremely Silly, Bordering On Stupid Show of the Year

Special mention in this category must go to Apple+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which manages to depict the Godzilla Universe’s catalogue of Kaiju as a serious and sober threat to world peace.

There’s also Netflix’s compulsively watchable Bodies, a twisty sc-fi murder drama, split across four timelines, each featuring the same time-travelling corpse.

But neither came close to the thick brilliance embodied by this year’s winner; Apple’s Hijack, a winningly stupid action-thriller that’s basically “24, But On A Plane”. 

Starring Idris Elba as a passenger on a one-man mission to untangle the mysteries of a commandeered aircraft, this is television designed to make you wonder why you’re watching it for the entirety of the seven hours you will find yourself glued to its preposterous twists and turns.

Best Show To Watch While On Your Phone The Entire Time

A well-deserved nod here for Disney+’s delightful podcast-based buddy comedy Only Murders In The Building, which despite featuring Paul Rudd and Meryl Streep in meaty roles this year, demanded no more attention from my synapses than a friend telling me about a dream they’d had.

Best Reassuringly Expensive Sci-Fi

The explosion in TV budgets over the last few years has seen ambitious speculative fiction firmly back on centre stage. 

The sixth series of Black Mirror (Netflix) provided chills and laughs with star-studded streaming satire ‘Joan Is Awful’ and paranoid astronaut fable ‘Beyond The Sea’. 

Meanwhile, a second season of Apple’s excellent space opera Foundation proved itself the gold standard for expansive, world-building narrative.

But away from the scale and warp of the live-action boys, HBO’s animated space drama Scavengers Reign marked itself out as the most compelling and mind-bending bit of science fiction telly of 2023. 

Set on a hostile alien world, it follows the deserted crew of a freighter ship struggling to stay alive in their new environment. 

Crucially, the real stars here are the plants and animals which inhabit the planet, continuously devising ingenious, and occasionally harrowing, methods of getting in our human protagonists’ way. 

This is squelchy, feverish storytelling at its most terrifyingly inventive.

Best How’d They Get There And How Will They Leave Show

The second season of Showtime’s plane crash survival drama Yellowjackets implied a show with a lot more goodies to come, while Apple’s baffling bunker brain-teaser Silo overcame a stodgy middle to land a majestic close to its inaugural series.

But it’s MGM+’s creepy village mindbender FROM that takes the top spot here. As regular readers will recall, no show had me as maddeningly obsessed this calendar year. 

There’s simply no substitute for a show that packs fourteen twists into every hour. Pulpy, elliptical showcraft at its most beguilingly bonkers.

Special Award For Making Me Laugh So Much I Could Not Breathe

The entire first season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO docu-comedy, The Rehearsal could be up for this award, but I will content myself with mentioning its bravura first episode, in which our stalwart presenter must help a quiz-addicted New Yorker disclose a long-held secret to a friend.

That he endeavours to do this by building full-scale replicas of both his house, and his local pub is one thing. 

But the manner in which he contrives to give his subject the answers to the quiz, over the course of a walk through Manhattan, is by some distance the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.

Best How Is This Real Documentary

Few documentaries were as boggling or impressive as HBO’s Telemarketers, which followed the rise of predatory practices within its titular industry. 

One of them was undoubtedly How To With John Wilson, which ended three completely perfect seasons on an absurd high.

But the standout for me was BBC’s Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland which told the story of The Troubles with a focus not on politicians or journalists, but everyday people, and the full nuance of their experiences.

Telling these stories with their mess and disappointment and mundane missteps intact, made this one of the most powerful documents ever created of that time. A stunning achievement.

Best Ah Shite, They’ve Cancelled It Already

Two solid entries here for Netflix, who killed off magick-romance-thriller Half Bad and teen-scented ghost-hunting yarn Lockwood & Co – with bonus sadism points for cancelling both mere weeks after they debuted.

However, the heaviest blow was HBO’s The Other Two, the most reliably hilarious and cliché-free comedy on TV, and now the most missed.

Following two lesser-known siblings of a global popstar, it was a savage showbiz satire that spent three seasons weaving a complex web around the absurdity and fickleness of 21st-century media culture. A fickleness that its unjust cancellation reveals as wholly, and sadly, real.