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.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2020

As always, I'm introducing my television wrap-up list by giving an update on my quest to watch less than 100 shows in a year.  I may have failed in the previous years, but folks, I finally did it.  In 2020, I fully watched -- meaning I saw every episode a series aired in the calendar year -- only 93 shows.  I'd like to thank my dear friend, the novel coronavirus, without whom none of this would be possible.

If you're thinking "93 shows is still too much television," well, you wouldn't be wrong.  That's not even counting the many shows I checked out for one or two episodes and then quit.  Despite some seasons getting pushed back and others getting cut short, there was still an avalanche of television put out this year.  Out of any small crack in the landscape will pop a new streaming service these days, so now along with the usual suspects, we had Peacock originals and HBO Max originals and, for a brief period of time, Quibi originals (RIP).  It's hard to even consider myself a TV expert anymore.  Any time I tell somebody that I watch alot of TV, they'll inevitably say something like "Oh cool, have you seen that new Netflix show about the anthropomorphic cat who's also a depressed sex worker?"  Before you fire up your search engine, that show does not actually exist, but the point is that there's a whole culture of streaming service crate-digging that I'm just not keyed into at all.

Despite my decreasing completionism, my love of the medium hasn't abated.  2020 was an excellent year in television -- it may not have had the depth of previous years, but the sheer breadth of it was refreshing and exciting.  The best of what the year had to offer came in so many different forms, including anime, docuseries, and especially the increasingly popular limited series format.  There was also a great mix of old favorites and new surprises.  In fact, the number one entry on this list was a sensation that nobody saw coming.  What show is that?  Find out below!

The rules: Last year I implemented a new rule to help account for streaming seasons that got dropped at the end of the year, and I'll be continuing that this year.  So for any show whose entire season drops at once, the eligibility window for this list is if that season dropped between December 13, 2019 and December 10, 2020.   So season 2 of You, which Netflix dropped all at once on December 26, 2019, is eligible for this list.  Any streaming season that dropped after December 10th of this year will be eligible for next year's list.  I know it's confusing but that's the only why I can maintain my sanity and not have to catch up on things at the very last minute.  Thankfully the rules are simpler for shows that air weekly.  For those cases, any episode that aired between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020 are considered for this ranking.

Better Call Saul finds another gear in its fifth and best season

It's hard to imagine feeling so right now, but Better Call Saul seemed like a monumentally bad idea when it was first announced.  Spinoffs are, more often than not, creatively bankrupt cash grabs and making one for a beloved series like Breaking Bad ran the risk of souring people on the whole franchise.  Luckily, the series has proven that no matter what challenge you put in front of this creative team they'll churn out great television.

Though while it was always terrific on a purely technical and objective level, the show never was able to engender the kind of intense fervor that its predecessor was able to for me.  I've always really liked Better Call Saul, but I loved Breaking Bad.  All of that changed in the former's excellent fifth season, which just concluded its thrilling ride earlier this week.

Saul has always been two shows in one, with Jimmy and Kim living out their morality plays in one corner and Mike and Gus embroiled in the power plays of the Albuquerque drug trade in another corner.  Both were pretty compelling, though the drug half often suffered from prequel-itis more than its counterpart, simply going through the motions to put things in the place of Breaking Bad's starting point.  Now that those two halves have merged, season five felt like the series was finally humming along and realizing its full potential.  Previously the show's two modes conversed with each other only on a thematic level -- the entire universe is populated by people chiseling away at the list of things they are unwilling to do -- but it's way more electric when they're actually intertwining on a literal level.

Last season saw Jimmy finally adopting the Saul Goodman moniker, and this year his slide into the inevitable accelerated at a rapid pace, becoming a "friend of the cartel" and getting tangled up with wildcard Lalo Salamanca.  The intersection of the legal and cartel hemispheres of the world led to one of the season's best episodes, "Bagman," where Jimmy's mission to pick up Lalo's seven million dollars of bail money turns into a grisly shootout, followed by a long sojourn in the desert with Mike.  It's an episode that recalled Breaking Bad's classic "4 Days Out" -- surely not a coincidence that Vince Gilligan, who has ceded day-to-day control of Saul to Peter Gould, returned to direct this hour -- blending all of this creative team's strengths together.  It's at once full of nailbiting tension, atmospheric patience, and ingenious plotting.  One of the things that's admirable about Better Call Saul is that it has thoroughly staked out its own identity, so it almost feels wrong to praise the show for injecting some more Breaking Bad into its veins, but it's hard to deny that it sings when working in that style.

The fact that it's a prequel has always loomed over the show narratively.  At the end of the day, we know where the show's going to end up.  A problem that frequently plagues prequels is that it's hard to invest in what you're watching since it's all in service of a known endpoint.  Better Call Saul has circumvented this in two ways.  The first is simple: it has made the audience savor the journey through its sheer craft and leaning into the clockwork fatalism that was even baked into Breaking Bad instead of running away from it.  But more importantly, it knows that because we're largely aware of how things end, it can wring out tension and emotion from homing in on the unknown variables in the equation.

It's not a surprise that this season Kim, Nacho, and Lalo were the most compelling characters to follow.  We know the broad strokes of what can and can't happen to the likes of Jimmy, Gus and Mike, which makes the open possibilities of anything involving Kim, Nacho, Lalo feel all the more gutwrenching.  Lalo's status as a chaos agent is amplified by the fact that he's an invention of Better Call Saul and we therefore have no idea what he'll do next.  Meanwhile, Nacho's role as a double agent and his desire to get out of the game has even higher stakes knowing that he may not be long for this world.

Where this pays the biggest dividends, however, is with Kim.  She's been the show's best character from the outset, partially because it's hard not to be when Rhea Seehorn is giving a pantheon performance playing her, but Kim's only gotten more fascinating as the show has gone on and toyed with our perception of how things could turn out for her.  Most people just assumed in the beginning that things would eventually end poorly between her and Jimmy once his full evolution into Saul Goodman was complete.  What season five did was reveal a failure of imagination within all of us.  From suggesting that she and Jimmy get married once he gets involved with the cartel to her confronting Lalo head-on when he imposes on them in their home, Kim was constantly upending our expectations.  It seemed as if truly anything could happen with her in these 10 episodes.  Would she leave Jimmy after he finally did something to cross the line?  Would she get killed right on the spot when Lalo shows up at their doorstep?

The actual answer is simpler and more tragic.  Though she's always found thrills in Jimmy's grifting game, Kim has also been the closest thing the show had to a moral center.  But really, when we thought we were watching Jimmy's process of "breaking bad," this whole time we were slowly watching Kim's.  That feeling that something very obvious is being revealed before our eyes is what makes the scene where she's suggesting to Jimmy that they illegally sabotage Howard to force a resolution to the Sandpiper case makes it so heartbreaking, even more so because Jimmy seems to understand she's past the point of no return too.  The moral corrosion was always within her, Jimmy just provided the activation energy.

With next season being the show's final one, this year was the ideal penultimate season, perfectly ramping things up and setting everything in motion for an exciting conclusion.  And with the end nearing, Saul is pulling out all the stops.  We thought we were going into this show with a full map, but the brilliance of it is that it has proceeded to reveal all sorts of hidden rooms and passages we never could have imagined.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2019

Loyal fans have been waiting for a whole year to get to this day.  Not to see my actual list, but to hear me chronicle my crippling addiction to television and see whether or not I was able to limit myself to following less than 100 shows this year.  Well I've got some bad news for you: if we're counting the shows I watched every airing episode of this year, that number reached 102.  I know, I really thought I was going to meet my goal in 2019.  And I was so close!  I know I said this last year, but I really am quitting more shows and not starting more altogether, they just keep making more of them every year.  Those numbers simply can't be beat.

One thing I've noticed with my list this year is that it feels a little different than previous years, and I can't tell if that's due to a change in my taste or a change in the trend of what gets made.  But I will say this year there's less Very Serious Drama For Very Serious People (your Mad Mens, your Americans) and more stuff, especially in the top 10, that might make you say "huh"?  The idea that great TV comes in all shapes and sizes is a mantra I've repeated alot over the years, and we would all do well to remember that as the landscape transforms a bit in the next decade.

2015 Emmy Award predictions

The 67th Primetime Emmy awards air tonight at 8:00 PM EST, so I figured I'd offer some predictions for how the night will go down.  The Emmys seem a little harder to predict than the Oscars, so I could end up with only a 50% success rate, but that also makes watching the show a little more fun.  As always, there will be some frustrating picks from the voters, but more and more it seems like their choices are falling in line with the critical consensus.  Let's hope that means Modern Family's reign of terror will finally come to an end...

Pilot Talk 2015: Better Call Saul

Every TV season, networks bring out a new crop of shows, in hopes that they'll be the next big hit.  Pilot Talk is devoted to figuring out whether these shows are worth your time based on the first episode.

Better Call Saul seemed like a bad, bad idea.  TV spinoffs and prequels have a gigantic precedent of being disasters that you're better off avoiding.  That's not to say that it's impossible for one to be good, but for every Angel, there are about 100 Joeys.  It also just seemed like an unnecessary idea.  Breaking Bad was an excellent show -- one of my favorites of all time -- but after five seasons, I didn't need to be in that world anymore.  I was especially skeptical of the Better Call Saul's ability to sustain a character like Saul, who was a fun bit player on Breaking Bad, but didn't feel layered enough to be anything more than that.  Ultimately, this show felt like a way for AMC to continue cashing in on the 10 million people who tuned in to the Breaking Bad finale.

There shouldn't have been too much concern, because at the end of the day, the show is in good hands.  Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan co-wrote the pilot with high-level Breaking Bad writer Peter Gould, Michelle MacLaren directed the second episode, and multiple Breaking Bad writers round out the rest of the show's staff.  Even smaller aspects, like the editing and the score, are done by the same people who did it on Breaking Bad (Kelley Dixon and Dave Porter, respectively).  And you can tell from the cold open of the Better Call Saul pilot that it's just back to business for the crew.  It's too good to spoil, but it stands up there with the best Breaking Bad had to offer, and that show was known for its iconic and artistic cold opens.

It's not just the beginning of the episode either -- the whole pilot immediately reminds you of the Gilligan qualities that you missed so much.  Better Call Saul has got style to burn.  Vince Gilligan directs the first episode excellently, settling us into the drudgery of Jimmy McGill's (Bob Odenkirk) sad little life.  Indoor locations are shot with wide, oblong angles to really sell their drabness.  It's clear that Jimmy is imprisoned by his life's mundanity and mediocrity.  And it's just nice to be reintroduced to the world of Albuquerque that we loved so much in Breaking Bad, that bright, dry suburban malaise.

But it also does enough to distinguish itself from its sequel.  As I mentioned before, I was skeptical of the show's ability to promote Saul to a leading role, but Bob Odenkirk, with the help of Gilligan and Gould's writing, is able to unearth Saul's soul in a way previously unimaginable.  Jimmy McGill is a different man than Saul Goodman, not just in name but in sensibility.  Better Call Saul, at least so far, also feels more languid and deliberate than Breaking Bad.  Even at its slowest, the latter always had a ticking clock danger buried underneath the surface.  Saul doesn't have that, it just ambles by with its wry charm.  There's not even a very clear arc yet, but the individual moments are so entertaining that it's not hard to sink into the show's laconic vibes.

Still, there's an inevitable case of prequel-itis that this suffers from at times.  Jonathan Banks pops up a few times in the pilot, reprising his role as Mike, and feels extremely unnecessary to what's happening.  Surely, he'll tie into the story more as it moves along, but right now it feels like a cheap nod, their way of saying "hey look, another guy from Breaking Bad!"  An additional from Breaking Bad pops up at the very end of the pilot, and though he plays a bigger part than Mike, it still feels a little too cute.  All of the fanservice is easier to swallow because Gilligan and company have some terrific original creations too, most notably Saul's brother Chuck (Michael McKean), who seems to suffer from some strange aversion to electromagnetic waves.  McKean has been a wonderful character actor for decades -- including his recurring role on The X-Files, the show where Vince Gilligan cut his teeth -- and he's fantastic here as well.

AMC opted for a two-night premiere, airing the pilot Sunday after The Walking Dead in order to generate bigger lead-in numbers, and then showing the second episode on Monday night in its regular timeslot.  This process benefited the show not just because the first episode ends in a way that'll make any fan salivate for the next episode, but also because this second episode does an even better job of assuaging the fears one might have had going into this series.  "Mijo" is where the themes of Better Call Saul really start to take shape.  Where Breaking Bad was about a good man who slowly traded away his humanity for money and power, Saul is about a man who has done bad things in the past (as evidenced by his Slippin' Jimmy story) but is desperately trying to do the right thing.  I honestly wasn't expecting how emotional I got at certain points of "Mijo."  That's not to say that Breaking Bad was a cold show, but the pathos comes from a softer and ultimately different place on this one.

So after two episodes, I've gone from highly skeptical to fully onboard.  "Uno" and "Mijo" didn't light the world on fire, but they reassure any doubters that this is a team of people who know how to construct television.  Is Better Call Saul necessary?  No.  But it's nice to have it anyway.

Pilot grade: B
Second episode grade: B+