The 50 best TV shows of 2023 - 50 to 11

Featuring Rain Dogs (No. 50), The Change (No. 46) and Boat Story (No. 45).

Dysfunction done right in Rain Dogs

The London-set tragicomedy about a struggling single mum is less a plea for sympathy than a showcase for flawed humanity and (occasionally outrageous) gallows humour.

Leave it to dialogue by Cash Carraway, creator and writer of BBC One's eight-part, soot-black dramedy Rain Dogs, to best describe her lead character: deadpan, defiant single mother Costello, played with lairy elan by Daisy May Cooper (Am I Being Unreasonable?). As stated by Adrian Edmondson's Lenny, a wheezing, ruined Lucian Freud-esque artist: "The problem is, you don't know your place. But that's the best thing about you."

Similarly, Rain Dogs (based on Carraway's visceral memoir, Skint Estate, and already on HBO in the US), refuses to play out as an anguished, one-dimensional treatise on class and poverty for audiences to sigh and weep over. After Costello and her daughter, Iris (a nuanced performance from newcomer Fleur Tashjian), are evicted from their flat, the aspiring writer and alcoholic (barely three months sober) scrabbles for work at a peep show, wrangles a room from a stranger by modelling a "nightie" (he says she has a "food bank body... lots of carbs"), breaks into a car, and more. And that's just in the opener.

Accompanying her on this odyssey to dysfunctional welfare-Oz are "proud pervert" Lenny (he paints her vagina and masturbates as she cleans his flat) and ditzy, spirited Gloria (Ronke Adékoluẹjo). Then there's putative father figure to Iris and Costello's main trauma-bonded foil, "classical homosexual" Selby (Jack Farthing), a drug-addled, rehab-resistant Withnail who's insulated by family wealth. As the episodes unfold, Costello and Iris end up skidding and reeling through various scenarios (entering a women's refuge; cos-playing yummy mummydom; socially cleansed from London). This, you feel Rain Dogs is saying, is the fever dream of modern poverty: humiliating, exhausting, random.

There are missteps. What should be a deep dive into Costello's dark family history is kept blankly surface-level. As brilliant and merciless as Rain Dogs is at skewering poverty voyeurism ("I will not be your liberal victim of the week"), the same point is endlessly replayed until it loses its bite. Still, what a bold, wild-hearted ride, and what a fiercely original performer Cooper is shaping up to be.

Rain Dogs review

BBC comedy drama about homeless single mother has had rave reviews, so what am I missing?

Rain Dogs review

London's grim, grimy, highly watchable underbelly.

Rain Dogs, BBC One, review

Messy, sharp, devastating, and Daisy May Cooper's best work yet.

Rain Dogs review

Daisy May Cooper is magnificent in this bleak, beautiful comedy drama - which skewers the grotesque realities of class and sex inequality like nothing else.

Rain Dogs review

Brilliant, bleak sketch of life at the arse-end of Rishi Sunak's Britain.

Rain Dogs review

Daisy May Cooper is perfect for this brazenly funny and desperately sad dramedy.

Rain Dogs review

Ambitious, original drama does too many things at once.