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The 20 Best TV Shows of 2022

Rumors of streaming’s demise are premature, as nearly half of the shows on this list are streamer properties.

Earlier this year, Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” raced back up the Billboard charts, marking the very first time that the British singer has cracked the U.S. Top 10. It is, of course, a testament to the power of television, as the song’s inclusion in the latest season of Netflix’s Reagan-era sci-fi series Stranger Things has prompted millions to discover—or rediscover—Bush’s catalog.

Netflix desperately needed the good PR, what with their declining subscriber base and recent layoffs. But just as terrestrial TV has been pronounced dead more times than we can count, rumors of streaming’s slow demise are obviously premature, as nearly half of the shows on this list are streamer properties. (And speaking of the un-dead, we’ve included two network TV shows, Abbott Elementary and Survivor, for good measure.)

New shows like David Simon’s We Own This City and Apple TV+’s Severance, which skewers its own parent company, skillfully confront current events with self-awareness and urgency. But from Better Call Saul to Barry—which, after a three-year, hiatus, is more morosely hilarious than ever—the best shows of 2022, regardless of platform, are by and large returning ones, as the characters and storylines have only gotten richer with time. As the success of “Running Up That Hill” seems to suggest, everything old is good again. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mentions: Andor, Interview with the Vampire, The Patient, Ramy, Reservation Dogs



Derry Girls

20. Derry Girls

Bowing out with a finale based around the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that largely ended the conflict in Northern Ireland, Derry Girls proved once again how powerful a tool comedy can be in capturing the nuances of real-life events. Over three seasons, the series has never shied away from the violence of the era, its anarchic humor delivered with directness and poignancy. Creator and writer Lisa McGee perfectly balances wit and raucous comedy to tackle topics such as queerness and grief with highly specific cultural references—like how Protestants keep their toasters in the cupboard—peppered with borderline crude jokes and leftfield cameos from the likes of Chelsea Clinton. John Townsend

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Abbott Elementary

19. Abbott Elementary

Even if you’ve never been a teacher, you’ve probably loved one, and creator-writer-star Quinta Brunson’s mockumentary-style comedy Abbott Elementary is an extraordinarily witty and passionate portrayal of basically good people doing the best they can with scant resources, underfunded programs, and shoddy infrastructure. The series emphatically (and hilariously) embraces progressive pedagogical concepts like Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. But the key to the show’s success is its profound empathy for its characters, including Janelle James’s self-promoting principal and Sheryl Lee Ralph’s quietly majestic veteran teacher Barbara Howard. These characters are treated with the kind of fundamental respect often missing in both storytelling and public education alike. Dan Rubins



Survivor

18. Survivor (Season 42)

Season 42 (!) of Survivor emerged as one of the show’s all-time great feats of editing, with the most coherent assembly of multiple player narratives since South Pacific. The convergence of multiple distinct narratives in the post-merge was handled with finesse, to say nothing of some of the best visual humor the series has seen in years. And the cast was outstanding, be it hangry challenge beast Jonathan Young, oddly loveable (and gullible) firefighter Mike Turner, and wannabe godfather Hai Giang. Even the season’s designated goat made a compelling case for their personal and performance growth. It was also a consistent display of high-level gameplay, with multiple players pulling off blindsides and manipulations one rarely sees anymore in first-time players. After years of Survivor losing its way with misplaced emphasis on trinkets and twists, season 42 was a shot in the arm for the series. Jake Cole



The Dropout

17. The Dropout

What makes The Dropout, adapted from Rebecca Jarvis’s podcast of the same name, so spectacular is how delicately and sparingly it fictionalizes the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried). The details are strikingly unembellished, but it’s the perspective-shifting storytelling that brims with imagination. Recalling Shakespeare’s ultimate treatment of villains like Richard III that audiences have been asked to invest in, even cheer for, The Dropout subtly turns on Elizabeth as it identifies its most convincing heroes who enter late in the game: the young whistleblowers Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young Kim) and Tyler Shultz (Dylan Minnette). The discovery that Elizabeth might not be the most interesting or important person on screen at all times is what makes The Dropout so watchable and so often startlingly moving. Rubins



Irma Vep

16. Irma Vep

Certainly, in a digital age where film studios and streamers seem to value blockbusters that rarely have a clear artistic identity, it’s understandable why writer-director Oliver Assayas was compelled to re-tell the showbiz satire Irma Vep. In the form of a limited series, commentary on the studio system ostensibly has the space to blossom even more vigorously and expansively. The result is a playful, personal work that expands on his original film in new and meaningful ways. Especially in increasingly pointed dialogue exchanges, this Irma Vep really leans into the absurdity of trying to find room for creative and personal expression in an industry that’s in a perpetual state of reinvention. It’s a credit to Assayas’s willingness as a creator to dig ever deeper into his experience as a filmmaker and person that this remake of a remake telling the story of a remake of a remake finds such original and organic material to mine—and does so with such a personal touch. Will Ashton

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The Righteous Gemstones

15. The Righteous Gemstones

Dysfunctional dynasties are all the rage on TV today. And while HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones hasn’t quite garnered the same fanatical devotion as the network’s similarly themed Succession, Danny McBride’s impressively methodical family dramedy continues to thrive in its second season. It’s bigger, broader, more bombastic, mirroring the rising ambitions of the blasphemy-shouting evangelicals at its center, but it thankfully doesn’t display those characters’ lack of self-awareness. Unlike his prior shows, Righteous Gemstones benefits from McBride’s unsuspecting mix of compassion and contempt for these deeply hypocritical religious fanatics, allowing this lavish satire to never become too sneering or spiteful of them. While the series grows increasingly violent, with more criminality, destruction, and scheming than in the past, it’s also more content to explore the strife within this increasingly unstable family. Ashton



The Midnight Club

14. The Midnight Club

Created by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong and based on the work of Christopher Pike, The Midnight Club smartly uses the trappings of horror, and other modes of genre fiction, to explore the power of storytelling as a means of reckoning with the unfathomable. The cinematography effects an air of foreboding, with claustrophobic close-ups and slow pans that imply the presence of creatures looming just out of frame. The series channels various genre traditions in style and theme to reveal the psyches of their weavers. Storytelling, as The Midnight Club understands it, is a vehicle of agency. And agency, in turn, is the foremost tenet of life in the series, prized by its teens as well as the adults around them. Ultimately, the show’s characters aspire to achieve agency not just in life but in death. Niv M. Sultan



Euphoria

13. Euphoria

Much of Euphoria’s second season strikes a balance between creator Sam Levinson’s impulse toward lavish theatricality and the affecting character moments that lie at the heart of his series. The show’s approximation of Twitter discourse and its commentary on the self-care trend lend it a sense of lucidity even as its portrait of modern teen life grows more dreamlike. The series doubles down on staking its claim as the classiest and most artistic form of the lowbrow high school drama ever, but what lies beneath the debauchery is a powerful dramatic core, particularly in the story of Rue (Zendaya), as she navigates her relapse in ways that betray the faint optimism beneath all the teenage decay. Rue’s storyline results in some of the most harrowing episodes in the series to date, as Levinson asks whether or not she’s worthy of forgiveness—a theme that’s threaded throughout the entire season. Anzhe Zhang



Stranger Things

12. Stranger Things

Stranger Things is the sort of pop-cultural juggernaut that can even shake up the music world, sending a 37-year-old song soaring up the charts. But the show’s craft, including its plotting and pacing, is also reaching new heights in its fourth season, the second volume of which drops this week. The first volume’s final episode is a visually spectacular marvel, unspooling a jaw-dropping series of twists about the origins of Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), a demonic assassin that’s been killing teenagers all season long, that knits the show’s increasingly disparate storylines together. Even as the Duffer Brothers spread their characters out geographically, sending Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman) on a buddy-comedy adventure to Russia to rescue Hopper (David Harbour) while Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) languishes in an isolation tank restoring her traumatic memories in Nevada, they also keep finding new riches to excavate in Hawkins, Indiana. The alternate universe within the Upside Down has never been scarier, and the young actors exploring it turn in their warmest, funniest, and most mature performances to date. Rubins

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We Own This City

11. We Own This City

David Simon’s We Own This City sees the creator of The Wire turn his attention back to the Baltimore drug trade after over a decade of expanding his scope to the Iraq War (Generation Kill), post-Katrina New Orleans (Treme), and the New York sex industry (The Deuce). Based on the book of the same name by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, the series jumps back and forth between eras to tell the story of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, which was implicated by the F.B.I. in a major corruption case in 2017. We Own the City’s hardened naturalism is satisfyingly immersive: We’re shown the nitty-gritty of everyday police work with the addictive attention to detail that distinguishes Simon’s work. David Robb



Severance

10. Severance

Severance unfurls in increasingly bizarre, unsettling ways throughout nine sleek and stylish episodes. Taking the notion of separating your work life from your home life to the literal extreme, it offers a moody, persistently bleak depiction of the influence of tech culture. In the show’s vision of a corporate dystopia, employees are allowed to distinguish and differentiate themselves from their cubicles and the lives they live (or, rather, don’t live) while under the imposing influence of a company’s large, looming surveillance. Throughout the season, the characters’ growing distrust, of knowing that they can’t fully maintain a life that doesn’t belong to them outside of work, feels timely and relevant. The idea of giant tech conglomerates consuming our lives, whether or not we work under their employ, is admittedly dour stuff. But thanks to its smart, sophisticated direction and sharp performances, Severance is never didactic, and mercifully doesn’t feel like work. Ashton



The Rehearsal

9. The Rehearsal

Through the simple idea of “practicing” life events, Nathan Fielder’s hilarious The Rehearsal explores the idea that you can never truly know how another person will act or how a life might play out. Fielder constantly builds on that existential thesis by taking it to incredibly devious extremes, building artificial constructs of people and places where the joke is just how difficult these scenarios are to maintain. One memorably absurd setup finds Fielder’s team covertly swapping out child actors to avoid running afoul of labor laws, while another follows the thread of his absence as a pretend “father” to its comically dark conclusion. In the process, The Rehearsal becomes a clever, thoughtful reflection on the very idea of nonfiction filmmaking itself, all the while populated by truly bizarre human subjects who further the idea that no level of preparation can possibly be enough for the surreal, spiraling nightmare of living among other people. Steven Scaife



Better Things

8. Better Things

Throughout the final season of Better Things, conversations with friends, family, and managers often take place via phone or FaceTime, and there’s a tinge of melancholy to all this that makes the moment of communal togetherness in the final episode feel all the more euphoric. The series looks inward at how Sam (Pamela Adlon), on a micro level, is affected by the world. It’s in everything from her nervous body language to her incessant tee-hee-ing. She remains a work in progress, but Better Things mercifully leaves us with the comfort that her heart is settled. After all, she’s done right by her family and friends, and their gift to her, and us, is to tell her as much. Ashton

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The White Lotus

7. The White Lotus

Mike White’s darkly comic skewering of the American ideal of the destination vacation continues in the second season of The White Lotus. This time around, vacationers from the U.S., each oblivious to their surroundings and position in their own way, bring their foibles, insecurities, and everyday hypocrisies with them to a White Lotus resort overlooking Mount Etna in Sicily. The White Lotus is at once a whodunit, a satire, and a Greek tragedy where fateful powers may be at work behind the petty squabbles of mortals, teasing viewers about which of its overlapping dramas might result in murder. Meanwhile, it alludes, through glimpses of pseudo-classical murals on the hotel’s walls or myths partially recounted by its characters, to the ineffable forces at play in interpersonal relations. It’s a bit heady, perhaps, but White’s irreverent tone—the Italian lounge music that bridges scenes, occasional farcical scenarios of overlapping dates and mistaken appearances—softens the potential pretension into something devilishly playful. Pat Brown



Pachinko

6. Pachinko

Emblematic of an old adage that likens the Korean peninsula to a shrimp caught between whales, Pachinko sees its multi-generational characters navigating the loss of their national and cultural identity amid the effects of Japanese colonialism in the early 20th century. Adapted by Soo Hugh from Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name and directed by Kogonada and Justin Chon, the limited series is an artfully staged and detailed historical epic that alternates between three time periods, juxtaposing the present with poignant memories of one family’s experiences across generations. The series creates a powerful and resonant perspective that captures both the triumphs and traumas of surviving through unspeakable hardships. Zhang



Barry

5. Barry

As ever, Bill Hader’s anguished visage stresses Barry’s drive to arrive at some kind of Hollywood ending. It’s a stunning, visceral performance that only grows sharper and more cutting with each new season, with Hader increasingly leaning into the ugliest, seediest, nastiest, yet weirdly sympathetic facets of Barry’s tormented persona. In its third season, the series is keenly interested in exploring the lasting damage caused by its accident-prone malefactors, as well as teasing the potential harm that could befall those around them. As Barry fearlessly digs into the depravity of its combustible characters, including Anthony Carrigan’s unfailingly polite but incompetent NoHo Hank, it only becomes more confident in its nervy, high-tension mix of showbiz satire and absorbing dramatic stakes. That’s a fitting irony, surely, as Barry’s ever-looser grip on his stability threatens anyone in his periphery. Ashton



The Bear

4. The Bear

The Bear uses propulsive, purposeful camerawork to cultivate a level of stress that’s certain to raise one’s blood pressure. The results are nothing less than transportive, offering a detailed look into the demands of a restaurant kitchen. We follow Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a chef who inherits his late brother’s floundering Chicago sandwich shop. Even without any setbacks, turning the place around would be a tall order for anyone, perhaps more so for the vastly overqualified Carmy, who’s more accustomed to the rhythms of fine dining establishments. The Bear astutely depicts labor as something that breaks you down, hammering you into a specific shape from which you can never really return. That conflict is the heart of Carmy’s own clashes with the staff, who have a particular way of doing things. That all involved eventually figure out how to keep the restaurant afloat may not be surprising, but it’s telling that their success is as much due to serendipity as hard work. Because sometimes luck just isn’t enough to make ends meet. Scaife

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Hacks

3. Hacks

It’s so easy to see how Hacks could have jumped the shark: by having Ava (Hannah Einbinder) flail about trying to keep her betrayal of Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) under wraps for the duration of the second season. Instead, Ava lets the cat out of the bag a mere two episodes into the new season and suddenly we’re delivered a different kind of prolonged comedy of discomfort. On a dime, the focus shifts to Deborah serving Ava a lawsuit and Hacks never pretends that it’s anything but empty bluster. Even if Ava’s obsequiousness suggests that she doesn’t always know that to be the case, she takes Deborah’s lashes because she at least knows that her boss respects her sense of humor. And across a domino-like series of events where multiple careers are threatened, these two women come to respect each other in ways that go beyond practical matters, and in the process Hacks blooms into a redemption story of unexpected tenderness. Ed Gonzalez



Atlanta

2. Atlanta

Atlanta has consistently provided some of the toughest and most refreshing satire on the entertainment world. Everyone from executives to professional activists show themselves to ultimately be profiteers with flexible moral standards. At one point in the show’s fourth season, Alfred Brian Tyree Henry) asks Earn (Donald Glover) how he rationalizes his work as a talent manager, Earn replies, “I just remember it’s not about what feels good. It’s about what survives.” Fundamentally, Atlanta is about the difficulty of finding contentment in a world that perpetually keeps you on the defensive. In such circumstances, you can never really settle down, no matter where you call home. (The sole exception is Lakeith Stanfield’s delightful, kind-eyed Darius, who seems happy living in his own reality, independent of the external world.) There may only be one place where the other characters ultimately find “home.” Samuel Harwood



Better Call Saul

1. Better Call Saul

Throughout much of Better Call Saul’s impeccable final season, Jimmy “Saul Goodman” McGill (Bob Odenkirk) gets the business depicted in Breaking Bad off the ground. It’s a harried process intercut with his and Kim’s (Rhea Seehorn) wackiest yet most spiteful scheme to date, seemingly insulated from the mounting paranoia of the cartel storyline. Then the show’s moral reckoning arrives, asserting how impossible it is in the decaying strip mall that is America to control and contain the consequences of doing bad in order to do good. Appropriately enough for a series that has gone in a quieter, less bombastic direction than its predecessor, the most pivotal moments feel subdued, or even deceptively minor: an apartment shooting, a department store heist, a taxi scam. It doesn’t take much for a life to unravel, and the various threads that encompass the life of Jimmy McGill reach back far, all the way to the start of the series. Marion (Carol Burnett) is exactly the sort of elderly person that he was once so good at ingratiating himself with, and it’s difficult to overstate the sheer magnitude of the pitch-perfect irony for how she ultimately brings about his ruin. Scaife

4 Comments

  1. You guys are usually on the money with this but come on, Andor was one of the greats this year, and I’d have Severance a lot higher up.

    • Andor had some great episodes (the one that copies the Cannons of Navarone was exquisite, the other one, the escape from the concentration camp with Serkis was riveting as well) and deserves to be in that top 20. The Ferrix/Corruscant episodes felt rather cheap/bloated on the other hand.

  2. nothing about Station Eleven? That beautiful and clever show was vastly superior to anything out there. It managed not only to provide a poignant but at the same time incredibly creative take on that old question, “is art useful? what is its value?”. It was also a marvelous modern take on Hamlet. Mesmerizing finale. Compare this with Irma Vep, that plodding, verbose, pretentious, pompous, navel-gazing Parisian ego-trip of the overrated Assayas. Day and night. And you chose night, pauvres de vous!

  3. I’m guessing that Station Eleven wasn’t included because most of it aired in 2021. It’s been left off many lists for that reason. And I personally loved Irma Vep and found the show refreshingly over the top and self-referential in all the best ways. But I agree, that if Station 11 was left off while being considered for 2022, that was a big oversight. Also, no Reservation Dogs? That to me was the biggest oversight.

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