My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2022

 

Alexa, play "3 Peat" by Lil Wayne.

That's right, for the third year in a row, I've accomplished the arbitrary goal I started to shoot for a few years ago of trying to watch less than 100 shows in full this year.  Although I did cut it close with 98 series, compared to 87 in 2021 and 93 in 2020, a win is a win.  I initially gave this mission to myself in order to watch less TV and focus on other interests, but even though I watched 98 shows, my relationship to television feels pretty healthy these days.  Sure, I watch alot of shows, but I waste far less time on things that are mediocre than I used to.

There wasn't much of an overarching trend to explain the TV landscape in 2022.  It was more about the continuation of narratives we've been living through for a while now, most notably the persistent dominance of a few streaming services when it comes to the content that takes up space in the market.  Although I do wonder whether that bubble is on the verge of bursting, particularly with the outrage that sparked from HBO Max's decision to remove some of their original content from the service in the past few months.

For me the theme of 2022, like all years, is that there's alot of good TV.  Let's take a look at some of those shows.

The rules: In recent years I started this thing where I had separate eligibility windows for streaming shows that dropped the whole season at once and shows whose episodes premiered weekly, but I'm dropping that because it was too confusing and most streaming services have switched to weekly releases.  Nobody reads this part anyway.  Shows are considered for this list based on their episodes that aired between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022.

Honorable Mentions (25-21)

Though the show has disappeared from the public consciousness, My Brilliant Friend (HBO) delivered another sumptuous season adapting Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series, which ends on a dynamite finale.  Nobody is making comedy quite like Danny McBride, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green, who delivered more bombastic absurdity with the second season of The Righteous Gemstones (HBO).  Showcasing some of the most adventurous direction on television, Servant (Apple TV+) pushed its eerie narrative to an even higher pitched intensity.  The second half of Ranking of Kings (Crunchyroll) finished airing at the beginning of the year, and this dark fairy tale was just as charming and empathetic as it started.  The English (Prime Video) blends a classical and revisionist approach to the western genre, telling a complicated and fractured journey that's challenging, but all the more satisfying when it finally comes together.

20. Lycoris Recoil (Crunchyroll)

Girls with guns is a mainstay genre for anime, so how do you make it feel fresh?  The answer is to have the sheer force of personality that Lycoris Recoil contains.  There's nothing particularly new about its setup, involving a secret government counter terrorism force that uses teenage girls for complicated urban camouflage reasons -- that's Anime 101.  What makes Lycoris Recoil a cut above is its execution.  Every aspect of the show's production is top notch: the detailed background design, some of the most expressive character animation of the year, incredible action filmmaking, and vibrant voice acting.  All of those elements combine to sell the appeal of the show, which is ultimately down to the chemistry of its two leads and seeing them play off of one another.  With a perfectly calibrated mixture of chipper vibes and darkness, there's something for everyone in Lycoris.

19. The Good Fight (Paramount+)

After a 13 year run, the Good franchise has (presumably) come to an end with season six of The Good Fight, and what a fantastic tenure it was.  Unshackled from the network television constraints The Good Wife had to adhere to, The Good Fight blossomed into its own thing, a zanier, angrier, more political cousin to its predecessor.  And the final season was business as usual, delivering the show's masterful combination of wacky subplots and rock solid legal procedural storytelling.  There was even one last wild alternate fiction idea that they swung for in the end, with its characters being presented with an idea to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up.  Lately, people have become obsessed with Michelle and Robert King's other current show Evil, but The Good Fight is still their best work.

18. My Dress-Up Darling (Crunchyroll)

There's nothing better than being able to share your interests with other people.  That's the whole reason I started this blog way back in 2013 as a lonely college kid.  My Dress-Up Darling understands that concept well in its telling of the story of the unlikely bond between Wakana Gojo, an introverted high schooler apprenticing at his grandfather's Hina doll shop, and Marin Kitagawa, his outgoing classmate who enlists his talents to help fulfill her dream of becoming a cosplayer.  Given the nature of most cosplay costumes, Dress-Up Darling is not without its horny moments, but it's way more invested in the mechanics of the creative process than it is in titillation.  This is actually a surprisingly wholesome show, one that at its core is about how nice it is to have someone to hang out with, as its best moments depict the journey of these two characters feeling each other out and becoming friends.  With a maturity to its characters and a deep dive into a fascinating niche subject, My Dress-Up Darling is 2022's best romance.

17. Primal (Adult Swim)

If you came of age anywhere between the late 90s and mid 2000s, there's a good chance that Genndy Tartakovsky's work on Cartoon Network heavily defined what you thought of animation.  Between creating Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack, along with doing work on Powerpuff Girls and various other cartoons, his direction was unmistakable whether you knew his name or not.  Marked by meticulous rhythms and long silences, Tartakovsky's shows are an excellent testament to the power of animation as a medium, and he's only gotten better at his craft, doing some of his best work this year in season two of Primal.  Operating largely dialogue free, the series offers dazzling visual storytelling in its brutal prehistoric world.  The second season was a little more serialized than its first, delivering a compelling overarching narrative about parentage and revenge that felt more creative and confident.  Sometimes limitations are good when making art, but Primal proves that Genndy Tartakovsky unleashed is when he's at his best.

16. The Dropout (Hulu)

2022 was the year of the scammer show.  Between Apple TV+'s WeCrashed, Netflix's Inventing Anna, and Showtime's Super Pumped, networks and streamers couldn't get enough of stories about people who bamboozled others out of money.  Hulu's The Dropout falls into that category as well, but it manages to transcend that classification through its creative flair and solid storytelling instincts.  In its retelling of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, the show digs deeply into the peculiar woman at its center, genuinely interested in what makes her tic and sympathetic to her without ever forgiving the damage she wrought.  That wouldn't work nearly as well as it does without the long-underrated Amanda Seyfried's transfixing work as Holmes.  In a year of series that seemed to only exist to watch actors do their best impression of real life people (see: the misguided Pam and Tommy), Seyfried tapped into a pathos that goes beyond mere imitation.

15. Bocchi the Rock! (Crunchyroll)

Having a job as an animator in Japan is a tough break.   Faced with mammoth workloads and tight deadlines, production often falls apart on anime, leaving animators burned out by the end of the season.  But sometimes the stars align and everything falls in place for talented people to do their job to their best ability.  Such is the case with Bocchi the Rock!, a 12 episode work of increasing visual madness.  The show takes the simple premise -- girl with crippling social anxiety and incredible guitar skills who yearns to connect with people by starting a band -- and uses it as a jumping off point for exquisite comedic gags that push the limits of animation.  If it merely functioned as a visually stunning bit machine, that would have been enough, but it's also a great depiction of the warm comfort in finding people to be creative with.  When the style and the substance of Bocchi the Rock! are clicking together, it's a joy like no other.

14. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+)

Star Trek is a pretty daunting franchise to get into.  There are a total of over 700 episodes across its many live-action series and animated series, and more than a dozen films.  That's not to mention every fan seems to have a different of idea of where to start and what to skip on your journey.  If you're like me, maybe your only experience with Star Trek was the JJ Abrams films, and you tried to get into TV Trek with the newer series like Discovery and Picard, but bounced off of them because they were, quite frankly, not very good.  Well, Strange New Worlds is exactly what you're looking for.  This latest series in the franchise delivers what fans have been demanding for ages: episodic adventures focused on exploration, discovery, and sometimes even body swapping.  "Episodic" seems to be a bad word to creators these days, but it's amazing what that storytelling structure can achieve when done properly.  And Strange New Worlds does it exceptionally, tossing engaging stories at its distinct and well realized crew of characters with an impressive ease.  It doesn't matter if you're an inveterate Trekkie or a total newbie, this is just terrific television.

13. House of the Dragon (HBO)

After the bungled ending of Game of Thrones, nobody was eager to return to the world of Westeros, and yet here we are, dragged back against our will by the power of House of the Dragon's delicious palace intrigue, petty court squabbling, and metaphors about nuclear brinkmanship.  What it lacks in the flashiness of shocking plot turns that its predecessor provided, Dragon makes up for it in the kind of television I prefer: delicate scene construction that's hypnotized by the power of two people in a candlelit room talking, and well-tuned to their intricate, often conflicting desires.  The first season was not without its missteps -- time jumps that disoriented the storytelling momentum, basically any time it attempted Thrones-esque spectacle -- but it dazzled in all the ways that mattered more.  I'm not enough of a provocateur to declare House of the Dragon better than the series it serves as a prequel to, but I'm willing to say that the conversation is less outlandish than you'd think.

12. Irma Vep (HBO Max)

In 1996, director Olivier Assayas made Irma Vep, a film starring Maggie Cheung (his wife from 1998 to 2001) as a foreign actress starring in a remake of the silent film Les Vampires.  It's an arthouse classic for a reason, an exhilarating work of punk rock filmmaking that's at once reverent of cinematic history and determined to set it ablaze from the top down.  Now in 2022, Assayas decided to make Irma Vep, a miniseries about a director enlisting a foreign actress (played by Alicia Vikander) to star in his miniseries remake of Les Vampires, a film that this director already remade earlier in his career that starred his ex-wife.  If that meta ouroboros is making your head spin, welcome to the wonders of Irma Vep (2022).  The series encompasses a freewheeling range of ideas, from satirizing Hollywood blockbusters, pretentious arthouse films, and prestige TV, to presenting its characters' struggle to finding meaning in the work they do.  At the center of it all is Vikander giving the performance of the year, veering from playful to emotionally rich and back again in the blink of an eye.  With the tangled Discovery/Warner mess that occurred this year, who knows what content will get greenlit going forward, so it's a relief that something this micro-targeted made it in at the buzzer.

11. As We See It (Prime Video)

There's more TV than ever, and yet there are many modes of television that are dying out all the same.  One of them is the kind of cozy, small-scale drama that Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) has been delivering since the 90s.  Despite mawkish simulacra of his work popping up in the form of This Is Us and its many copies, nobody does it quite like him, and after a few years out in the wilderness, he's back to what he does best with As We See It, which centers on the lives of three people in their 20s on the autism spectrum and the aide who helps them out.  Taking a humanist approach to its storytelling, the show burrows into its characters who are always trying their best and sometimes fall short.  Because of that mission statement, it's able to wring massive emotions out of tiny moments and gestures.  There's a reason why most television focuses on life and death stakes: it's far from easy to depict people going through daily life problems and make those conflicts watchable without being melodramatic.  When a show does it with As We See It's high level of skill, we ought to savor it.

10. Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

The espionage genre is known for its highly competent, smooth leads, but Slow Horses subverts that notion in its setup of following the members of Slough House, a limbo organization where failed and disgraced MI5 agents' careers go to die.  Horses gets off to the races quickly however, when the group stumbles into a right-wing terrorist plot and the stakes-raising ensues.  The show is deeply invested in the dangerous work of spycraft, but not so much that it forgets to liven up the proceedings with dashes of wry humor.  The taut, serrated storytelling is even more effective when you don't know if a moment of tension is going to be defused with a gag or ratcheted up by mortal danger.  On top of that, Gary Oldman is having the time of his life with his performance as the boorish boss Jackson Lamb, a drunkard who's quick with an insult but knows how to get the job done when needed.  Blending the clever dialogue of Justified, Homeland's thriller plotting, and the intrigue of a Tony Gilroy script, Slow Horses is a fantastic watch for all levels of espionage fans.

9. Cheer (Netflix)

Cheer, Netflix's docuseries about the best junior college cheerleading program in the nation, became an overnight sensation in the beginning of 2020, turning regular student athletes into minor celebrities.  Then, something even more wild happened: Jerry Harris, arguably the show's biggest breakout star, was arrested by the FBI in September of that same year for soliciting sex from minors.  Season two of the show tackles the issue head on in episode five, which is an accomplishment in documentary storytelling, offering a lucid examination of sexual coercion that wrestles with the feelings of those who loved Jerry while always making sure to center the victims' experience.  That the season manages to juggle that, the consequences of COVID, and introducing a rival school the camera crew follows without toppling under the weight of its scope is a minor miracle.  With its intense focus on the process of trying to achieve unbelievable feats of physicality, and the human interest stories of the people on that journey, Cheer deftly gives you a front row seat to all the highs and lows.  It's everything beautiful and terrible about sports in one riveting, heartbreaking package.

8. For All Mankind (Apple TV+)

Almost as important as the season of a show where it takes "The Leap" is what happens afterward.  And this year, For All Mankind proved that season two's liftoff into greatness was no fluke.  After landing on and colonizing the moon last year, Mars was the objective of the third season of this excellent alternate history space race drama.  And of course, that led to more of the show delivering on what it does best: creating impossible problems to solve through the power of unity and science.  It seemed like every other week it was giving us a perfectly crafted episode of nail-biting tension, where most shows only have one of those in the tank per season.  And those plot complications wouldn't mean half as much without the show's unparalleled ensemble, who continued to go on fascinating, layered journeys.  That deft melding of plot and character is ingrained in For All Mankind, where a single crisis can reverberate and create engrossing conflicts for about five separate storylines.  It seemed like everybody finally listened and jumped on the show's hype train in 2022.  If you haven't, then what are you waiting for?

7. Better Call Saul (AMC)

Better Call Saul's excellence always came through with such a workmanlike quietness that it was easy to take for granted how daring it was.  It was a risk to make a prequel series about the comic relief who was the sixth most important character on a thriller.  It was a risk to then have that show be bifurcated into two distinct storylines and not have them fully come together until halfway through the series.  It was a risk to have much of the final stretch of episodes take place in somber black and white.  But those risks always paid off, and led to a swan song season that felt less like a mind-blowing surprise and more like meticulously established pieces finally falling into place in a satisfying fashion.  Season six, which aired in two chunks separated by a merciful seven-week break, gave viewers all the varying tools in the show's arsenal, from the slow burn of watching characters backed into corners and trying to get their way out, to episodes of white knuckle tension, to terrifically crafted self-contained detours.  Endings are hard -- and I have some issues with the finale itself -- but overall Better Call Saul delivered an excellent final moral reckoning for the man of many names at its center.

6. Severance (Apple TV+)

Severance comes out of the gate with one of the most ingenious setups in recent sci-fi memory: a biotech company offers an opportunity for some of its workers to develop the perfect work-life balance, implanting a chip in their brain that causes them to forget everything about their outside life once they're at work and everything that happens at their job the moment they leave the premises.  A great setup isn't everything, however, and thankfully the show doesn't fumble the ball in executing that premise.  Much of its debut season explores the sinister implications of a company who would want to do this, and the kind of people who would agree to this procedure that essentially makes them two distinct individuals.  Sporting confident direction, locked-in performances from the entire cast, and a brilliantly antiseptic production design that sells the eeriness of Lumon's corporate hell, this season juggles excellent world building with tantalizing reveals, all while never losing sight of deepening its characters along the way.  Just when it seemed like the mystery box show was dead in the water as a concept, Severance has jolted it back to life.

5. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime Video)

Four seasons in and it still feels like a miracle that Amy Sherman-Palladino, queen of modestly budgeted charmers like Gilmore Girls and Bunheads, has been given buckets of money to make The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  Between the candy-coated costumes, the gorgeous recreation of 1960s New York, and the elaborately staged long take sequences, the money and the time is all up there on the screen, and never stops being a sight to behold.  The writing doesn't drag behind either -- after minor cracks in the storytelling of season three, the series was back to its perfect calibration of antic energy and character drama that sneaks up on you with its potency.  Picking up after Midge gets kicked off of Shy Baldwin's tour, season four explores her adjusting to a career in flux, as she finds work as an emcee at a burlesque club.  This new set of circumstances is used as another vehicle to examine the show's love of all types of performance and screwball comedy scenarios.  After another great string of episodes, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel finds itself in a great position to close things out with its final season next year.

4. The Rehearsal (HBO)

Something that was missing in far too many conversations about The Rehearsal was talk about how funny it is.  Like Comedy Central's Nathan For You, the previous brainchild of Canadian cringe comedy extraordinaire Nathan Fielder, his latest arrives upon so many philosophical, mechanical, and ethical questions that it can be easy to get lost in unpacking them.  Equipped with an HBO-sized budget and a maniacal sense of escalation, Fielder takes a simple premise -- "what if you could meticulously rehearse important events in your life before they happen?" -- and uses it as a springboard into a rabbit hole of detours and new wrinkles that cause us to question the reality of the project and whether it should've been made at all.  But again, it should never be forgotten that this is a hilarious show and not just a stuffy intellectual exercise.  Fielder has a gift for always finding the most fascinating people, the kind that have such distinct idiosyncrasies that you can't make them up, and using his quietly sinister demeanor to push the story into directions that produce eye-watering, wheezing laughs.  The fact that The Rehearsal can explore the limits of control over one's art and the moral responsibility creators have on the art they're making, while being the funniest thing on television is no small feat.

3. We Own This City (HBO)

David Simon and George Pelecanos already created the definitive statement on Baltimore and its infrastructural woes in the 2000s with The Wire, a consensus pick for one of the greatest shows of all time with good reason.  Think of We Own This City as an addendum, using a years long investigation into the corruption of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force to explore the problems fictionalized in its spiritual predecessor and how much worse real life has gotten since then.  And though it focuses solely on the police, it digs deep and provides a holistic view of the flaws in the system, chronicling all the different ways that failure is upheld.  It's a series that wrestles with itself, depicting the inherent conflict of policing as an evil concept but also being enamored by how cinematic "good" policework looks.  On paper that seems more like a dissertation than television, but what makes Simon and Pelecanos masters of their craft is that they understand the contours of drama and structure enough to examine those ideas while also making riveting, emotionally devastating storytelling.

2. The White Lotus (HBO)

Because season one of The White Lotus was a social satire, it primed people to think that's the only mode the show operates in, which led to many early reactions critiquing season two for not being "about anything."  The reality is that the Sicily-set second season was intentionally looser, eschewing obvious political points for a shaggier examination of love, loneliness, and the different ways we define happiness.  Season two was a season of transactions, most notably in the myriad storylines where sex is used as some form of currency, but also in the smaller ways people negotiate and compromise to eke out a little bit of satisfaction in their lives.  The White Lotus continues to be a show that entertains on two fronts.  If you just want surface pleasures, it's all there in the gorgeously filmed locales, wonderfully arch dialogue, and ping-ponging storytelling breadth.  But crack that shell to reveal hidden depths in its writing, from the emotionally complex turns that every story takes, to the richly observed intricacies of its characters.  So much of television is straightforward in its characterization that its rare to see a show like this, where people are animated by eight different layers of motivation, just like in real life.  Writer-director Mike White has managed to capture lightning in a bottle twice in a row now.  I was hesitant when season two was first announced, but now I'm willing to sit back and trust one of the millennium's great creators.

1. Atlanta (FX)

I love Atlanta for the same reason I've loved rap music all of my life.  More so than any other genre of music, rap rewards a level of built-in knowledge of various subjects that the listener brings into it.  It's such a referential style of music that the more you know about sports, drug slang, street life, movies, television, Black culture, and even the history of rap itself, the more likely you are to "get" it.  A song may have a line that you don't fully understand the first 20 times you listen to it, but then you gain some new life experience or ingest more culture and all of a sudden on the 21st listen, the lightbulb flickers on.  (Part of the reason why I resent sites like Genius a little bit is because they are shortcuts to experiencing the joy of discovery that I describe, but that's an essay for another time.)  Can you listen to rap music for the beats and the flows and still love it?  Of course.  But there's always that added layer of enjoyment waiting for you.

Throughout its immaculate four-season run, but particularly in the two seasons that aired this year, Atlanta functioned in a similar fashion.  Do you need to have seen the video of a bunch of children finding out they're going to see Black Panther to enjoy the season three premiere, which contains a scene that directly pays homage to it?  Is it mandatory to remember when H&M unwittingly perpetuated racial stereotypes with their campaign that featured black people wearing monkey shirts to laugh at the episode "White Fashion"?  Did you need to recognize Tom Hanks' goofy son Chet playing the white guy in "Trini 2 De Bone" who spoke patois in a way that Chet himself has regularly been criticized by the Black community for doing?  The answer to all of these is no, but what makes Atlanta special is that the reflections and cultural conversations are buried in there all the same for those who want to engage with it.

Although Atlanta sadly had to come to an end this year, it did so in splendid fashion, blessing us with two seasons and 20 episodes worth of television that was endlessly flexible and always surprising.  Atlanta operated in so many modes this year: it could give us unpredictable standalones that don't even feature the main cast, surreal flights of fancy, Twilight Zone-esque social parables, low-key slice of life observations, and a half hour that simultaneously functioned as the funniest episode of television and also a hood horror tale in the form of "Crank Dat Killer."  Some might have struggled with season three's constant shifts, but its freewheeling nature and mission to tackle its usual ideas about race and fame through a Eurocentric lens was thrilling.  Plus, it made season four's warm return to home all the more satisfying.  In the end, the show concluded as it always was: uncompromising in challenging the notions we have about what TV is supposed to be.

Well, that wraps things up for my best shows of 2022 list.  I love reading other lists, so feel free to share yours in the comments.  Or if you want to share your thoughts on my list, then you can do that too!  To see a complete inventory of all the TV I watched this year (with even more rankings), you can find it on this Google Doc.

Previous lists
2021

2020

2019

2018
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2013