In 2023, No TV Home Was Formidable Enough to Keep the World Out

It’s hardly surprising that the idea of the home as a fortress has become much more prevalent in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic made the home more of a refuge than ever, a safe place to gather and bake bread, do puzzles, and watch movies. As we had our groceries delivered, held meetings on Zoom, and fretted over elections, that sense of safety began to turn into anxiety. By the time we watched the Capitol building being overrun by insurrectionists, home didn't feel particularly safe anymore.

Many of the biggest TV shows of 2023 reflected the sense that we're not entirely sure home is a place of calm repose anymore. It's also a place where we got stuck and felt helpless, separated from friends and left to process things like news and the arts in isolation. Home is a complicated place, no more so than when the world is falling apart, and plenty of TV shows put that theme front and center.

One of the earliest examples of the year came via HBO's The Last of Us. A detour in the third episode told the story of Bill (Nick Offerman), a survivalist whose paranoid prepping left him with a homestead fortified against both the zombie hordes and the bands of humans who might otherwise come to take his home by force. Against his better judgment, he lets in Frank (Murray Bartlet), and so begins a sweetly awkward romance. "Long Long Time" allows these characters to find that rare thing in a post-apocalyptic landscape: a place to feel safe. The rest of the series exists as a testament to how rare that is after the fall of civilization.

Post-apocalyptic stories somewhat inevitably veer toward vindication for doomsday preppers, and "Long Long Time" certainly does that. But rather than fetishize Bill's preparedness for too long, the episode instead explores the ways in which building himself a safe space — and what is a doomsday bunker but the ultimate safe space — allowed him to explore less familiar terrain with Frank. That safe space can't last forever, of course. It seems for a moment that it will be the human raiders who can't be repelled forever, but instead it's time and illness that does them in. No home can keep you safe forever; the best you can hope for is a long time to rest.

Unsurprisingly, TV's most striking examples of home as a toxic fortress come from shows depicting the wealthy elite. Succession, in its final season, had plenty of poisonous real estate to be dealt with (Shiv and Tom's two-story apartment probably needed an exorcism after their vicious fight on Election Eve). Following Logan's (Brian Cox) death, there was the matter of his palatial Fifth Avenue townhouse, which Marcia (Hiam Abbass) offered to sell to Connor (Alan Ruck) before anyone even knew it was up for grabs.

Connor's home, the ludicrously-named "Austerlitz" ranch in New Mexico, was about as far removed from Logan's urban power center as possible. The series always underlined Connor's othered existence, in comparison to his siblings, and now, when it no longer matters, Connor can step into the murky shadow of his dad like the rest of them. Of course, the townhouse doesn't do much for Willa (Justine Lupe), his new bride, who is already feeling the walls close in around her as her marriage of financial convenience begins to entomb her.

If Logan’s Upper East Side cavern is doomed to crumble under the weight of the dead patriarch’s immoral legacy, there’s something more actively sinister happening in the homes in Dead Ringers and The Fall of the House of Usher. Both shows feature morally vampiric capitalist families based none too subtly on the Sacklers (on both shows, they’re responsible for an opioid epidemic). Both shows depict these families as Munsters-esque hodgepodges of biological relations, corporate cronies, and amoral hangers-on. And both families live in haunted houses, metaphorically and sometimes literally.

Two of Dead Ringers’ six episodes involve excursions to different estates: the Long Island home of would-be benefactor Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), lit like the main dining room of Hell, as the Mantle sisters (Rachel Weisz) are interrogated about just how far they’d be willing to pervert their gynecological endeavors in order to make it exciting enough for the Parkers to invest. Later in the season, they travel down south to the Alabama mansion belonging to the family of Rebecca’s wife’s Susan (Emily Meade). It’s the site where unspeakable acts of experimental medicine were practiced on pregnant women of color over the course of decades, women whose literal ghosts agonizingly haunt the cursed halls.

Literal ghosts and long-awaited curses are exactly what spell out the dark fate of the pharma family in The Fall of the House of Usher. Mike Flanagan turned the show’s title, borrowed from one of several Edgar Allan Poe stories that served as source material, into a challenge, looking for a way to literalize this wicked family’s downfall. He does, in the form of the dilapidated house at the end of a cul-de-sac, which serves as the setting for Roderick Usher’s (Bruce Greenwood) final confession.

A wealthy estate as the setting for crime or murder is far from a novel concept. Murder mysteries have been set in mansions forever — all those rooms and gardens and secret passageways and servants' elevators. Not to mention the guests with their inflated net worths, every dollar another motivation to kill. The Afterparty Season 2 set its mystery at an extravagant home in wine country. Only Murders in the Building is still so tied to its upscale Upper West Side apartment building that it staged a murder in two phases so that there would once again be a killing inside the Arconia.

Steven Soderbergh's Full Circle offered a double-edged look at the home as a fortress for wealth and corruption. The more outwardly criminal Mahabir family resides in an outer-boroughs compound, subject to police surveillance and a task force dedicated to taking them down. Meanwhile, the more "respectable" McCusker-Browne family, with their money laundered through years of "Chef Jeff" branding, live quietly in Manhattan apartments. But their homes can't keep them hidden.

Amid an investigation into the near-abduction of their son, Sam (Claire Danes) and Derek (Timothy Olyphant) answer questions in their home, where postal service investigator (don't ask) Melody Harmony (Zazie Beetz) clocks the signifiers of wealth, which immediately raise her suspicions. In the end, in order to atone for the evil her family has helped to unleash, Sam has to choose to give up some of that material safety — first a valuable painting, then the apartment itself, and perhaps even her freedom (though Sam as a respectable white lady probably won't do any serious jail time).

Emma Stone also plays a white woman who is complicit in harm being done to native populations in The Curse. There, the aesthetics of Whitney's purportedly sustainable "passive homes" say everything that executive producers Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie want to say about her self-interested brand of false philanthropy. The mirrored-glass exterior of the house makes it almost imperceptible (you can never really get a sense of how big or what shape it is), while constantly reflecting Whitney and Asher’s (Fielder) images back at them, which is the last thing they want.

In The Other Two, Pat Dubek’s (Molly Shannon) meteoric rise to Oprah-level lifestyle maven and media superstar in Season 2 set her up financially for life. But Season 3 sees Pat isolated and almost imprisoned by her own wealth. Sure, she can strike up any brand partnership she wants to get free stuff and can trade in Streeter (Ken Marino) for a relationship with Marvel's Simu Liu. But she can't so much as take a walk in the park without a security operation, which makes it not worth the effort. She ends up leaving her house in an old-lady disguise in order to feel like a person. It's not easy to play the "pity this rich person whose wealth has turned them into an alien" card, but Pat might be the one character on TV who can make that work.

One of the most straightforward depictions of home as a toxic and insufficient bulwark against the outside world came right near the end, in A Murder at the End of the World. Yes, another murder mystery set inside a massive retreat, this one set up by a tech billionaire (Clive Owen) who tries to pass the place off as a hotel. In actuality, it's a bunker, built to allow Owen's character and the select few minds (and wallets) he deems worthy to ride out the coming climate apocalypse.

In fiction, the role of the tech elite in the world to come is always evolving. Science fiction novels like Carl Sagan's Contact once envisioned an eccentric millionaire benefactor who would fund our hero's research and support them in the greatest discovery mankind had ever known. Now, it's easier to imagine tech moguls tinkering with their A.I. projects and feathering their own nests in preparation to go colonize the moon rather than affect change that might save our own world. Creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have depicted this bunker as dark, isolating, brimming with surveillance tech, and ultimately quite unsafe, given all the murders.

Lock yourself away from the world all you want, the TV shows of 2023 seemed to say, but the world will come knocking. The zombie hordes will find you, the ghosts of the past will haunt you, and all the money in the world ultimately won't protect you.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.