Billie’s Best of 2023: Happy Twentieth!

My twin cats Kara and Dax

What I watched this year, the state of the site, and the state of me.

Can you believe it? Doux Reviews will turn twenty in March of 2024. That is something to celebrate. And we will! Want to know how?

Throughout the month of January, I’m planning to observe our twentieth anniversary with posts about our top twenty hitting television shows, a new one every day or so. I want the winners to be a surprise. Although if you’ve been hanging around here much, you probably have some idea of which shows get the most hits and comments.

Now for some personal stuff. Feel free to skip the following paragraph.

This has been a very tough year for me. I literally lost my best friend in August. She was also my cousin, so we became close when we were little; I even moved here to Pennsylvania (from Los Angeles) to be near her. She had serious health problems that she was being quiet about, and she took her own life. It affected me so strongly that I became depressed. I also stopped writing, and thought quite seriously about quitting completely and letting my wonderful writers take over the site.

But I think I’m ready now to get back into the game. And posting a lot of fun anniversary stuff might be exactly what I need.

So I’ll be posting the Doux Top Twenty TV shows in January, as I mentioned above. I’m planning to post our most popular movie reviews and articles throughout February. And in March, we’re going to have an online party of sorts. More about this later.

Here’s the “State of the Site.”

Doux Reviews has gotten so large that we have over 10,000 reviews and we’re nearing 60,000 comments. We get at least 120,000 pageviews every month, and this year we leaped over 200,000 pageviews several times.

Advertising: Google Adsense started posting disruptive ads without telling bloggers first, so I eventually decided to take down all advertising. It only made me a couple of hundred dollars a year, anyway. (If you have any suggestions about how the site could make money, I'm all ears.)

Comments: I've had to turn on comment moderation and leave it on. Why? Because about half of the comments on the site are either spam or exceedingly nasty trolls. It's a drag, but it's become necessary in order to keep the site a safe place.

I hope that won’t stop you readers from posting comments, because we love your comments. We moderate as quickly as we can! But fyi, if it's the middle of the night on the east coast of the United States, your comment won't be moderated until morning.

Please don’t get me wrong. I'm not deleting dissenting opinions. Never. But an attack on the writer, even when it's me, is always deleted. I also delete trolling comments intended to start a fight or evoke a negative reaction. It just isn’t what we are here.

Feel free to ask me any question about the site in the comments. I promise I'll answer.

What I enjoyed watching in 2023

I still love the two shows I’m currently reviewing: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (which I'm calling Star Trek Snow), an exceptional new inning of my favorite franchise, and Outlander, a time travel show that just isn’t like anything else. Now that I’m getting my groove back, I intend to keep reviewing both of them.

This year, I also enjoyed the rebooted Quantum Leap. It started slowly, but it got good. Raymond Lee’s Ben Song has won me over, and I particularly like the added focus on the home team. Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell made The Diplomat one of the best series of the year for me, and I thought Apple+’s Severance was one of the most chilling sci-fi shows I’ve seen in years.

I try shows at random for all sorts of reasons. David Boreanaz is a reason. He’s why I tried Bones, although I didn’t stick with it. But I did stick with SEAL Team. I thought it would be a predictable action shoot-em-up with soap opera home life problems, but it was so much more than that.

SEAL Team is about everything that’s good about the U.S. military as well as everything that’s bad. It's about going to ugly parts of the world and doing ugly things. The show does mostly arcs instead of stand-alone episodes, and there’s an unexpectedly interesting focus on the addictive nature of the work and about how team members with illnesses and injuries lie to keep working. There’s honesty about how the higher ups are often untrustworthy because they put politics and their own goals over the health and lives of their soldiers. And there’s a wonderful dog as a long-running character. I found myself streaming the entire series (so far) and I’m looking forward to the seventh and final season when it arrives in 2024.

Let’s see, what else? I got into Ghosts (both of them), and Poker Face. I loved the final season of Star Trek: Picard, mostly as much needed closure for Next Generation.

My daughter Samantha and I rewatched both Gilmore Girls and The Mentalist and very much enjoyed them. I also rewatched Buffy and Angel and I have decided that Joss Whedon’s reveal as a major league a-hole will not diminish Buffy as a brilliant and extraordinary series that means the world to me.

I hope you all have a terrific 2024. And I hope you’ll check back in tomorrow, New Year's Day, for the beginning of our Doux Top Twenty Shows countdown.
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Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.