10 Worst New Series of 2023, According to Critics

Critics weren’t bewitched by this Anne Rice adaptation, starring Alexandra Daddario as a neurosurgeon who discovers the secrets and perils of her bloodline. “Barring a yet-untapped reservoir of magic, this tepid cauldron of gothic horror looks like the product of plenty of toil that, as viewing commitments go, might not be worth the trouble,” warned CNN’s Brian Lowry.

In this limited series, Eva Green and Vincent Cassel star as two agents dealing both with international cyberattacks and their own interpersonal estrangement. “There’s perhaps a decent feature film to be found in Liaison, but reveals that might have felt a bit anticlimactic at 100 minutes feel irredeemably disappointing at six hour-long episodes,” decreed The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han.

1987’s Fatal Attraction was an Oscar-nominated blockbuster film. 2023’s reimagining — with Lizzy Caplan playing the spurned ex-mistress to Joshua Jackson’s family man — was canceled after one season. “Bizarrely paced and overlong, the series’ story … lacks anything resembling urgency or transgressiveness, and even the sex scenes (which are surprisingly limited given that the whole hook of this show is ostensibly that it’s about an illicit affair) lack heat,” wrote Paste Magazine’s Lacy Baugher Milas.

From the creators of Cobra Kai came this action-dramedy about an elite special forces team that celebrates the success of a Las Vegas operation a little too soon. “The premise of a special forces unit struggling to locate a nuclear weapon after a night filled with drugs, booze, and more drugs is a recipe for all sorts of comical mischief,” IGN’s Kenneth Seward Jr. reasoned. “Sadly, despite all that promise, very little of Obliterated’s rampant debauchery is actually funny.”

A much-hyped, 1970s-set novel by Garth Risk Hallberg begat this 2000s-set series starring Chase Sui Wonders as an NYU student whose murder is linked to a series of fires around New York City. “On the page (some 900 of them), Fire was sometimes hard to follow. On screen, it’s harder to care, because almost no one in the talented cast registers as an authentic human being, which makes the many coincidences of the convoluted plot difficult to swallow,” our own Matt Roush declared.

Teen Wolf mastermind Jeff Davis adapted another story about adolescent werewolves — this one based on the book of the same name by Edo van Belkom — and even got Sarah Michelle Gellar to return to TV. But Buffy this wasn’t. “We have characters we don’t care much about, an underused big-name star, wooden acting (did we mention the wooden acting?), cheap-looking VFX (did we mention the cheap VFX?) and storytelling that makes little sense,” decided Decider’s Joel Keller.

Richard Armitage’s character may have been obsessed with his son’s fiancée (played by Charlie Murphy) in this story — a new take on the Josephine Hart novel Damage — but critics weren’t as enraptured with the resulting TV series. “Obsession has been hailed as the successor to Fifty Shades of Grey, but instead it gives us an overload of shlock, foreboding string music and some depressing, grunty shagging,” The Independent’s Jessie Thompson wrote. “The thinly drawn, two-dimensional characters leave the actors helplessly stranded.”

Anthony Doerr’s bestselling, Pulitzer-winning novel got the TV treatment in a series about a blind French girl (Aria Mia Loberti) and a young German soldier (Louis Hofmann) on a collision course during World War II. “Nothing about this final product suggests that [director Shawn] Levy or [screenwriter Steven] Knight was the right choice to bring this story to the screen,” RogerEbert.com’s Marya E. Gates lamented. “Their vision for Doerr’s novel is shallow, messy, and, most unfortunately, instantly forgettable.”

John Carpenter is responsible for horror classics like Halloween and The Thing, and then there’s this TV anthology about real-life scares in otherwise idyllic hometowns. “Without the attachment of Carpenter’s name, Suburban Screams would just be negligible, but probably unreviewed,” observed The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg. “With his name, it’s disappointingly negligible and here we are.”

Creator Sam Levinson publicly said he thought this show — starring Lily-Rose Depp as a struggling pop star and The Weeknd as her cult-leader mentor — would be the biggest show of the summer. Instead, it was perhaps the most torturous. “While it’s tempting to say that everything you’ve heard about it is true, that may be soft-selling how skin-crawling the experience of actually watching this satire (?) on the seven circles of showbiz hell is,” wrote Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “The double-dose the [Cannes Film Festival] screened felt nasty, brutish, much longer than it is, and way, way worse than you’d have anticipated.”