Earlier this month, 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 half of the shows on this list are streamer properties. (And speaking of the un-dead, we’ve included one network TV series, Abbott Elementary, 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 so far, 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
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
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. Will Ashton
Better Call Saul
In the sixth season of Better Call Saul, the juxtaposition between the cartel world and the legal world has never been starker as we watch Jimmy “Saul Goodman” McGill (Bob Odenkirk) get 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: to frame longtime nemesis Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) as an unraveling coke fiend. With outrageous disguises and some creative distribution of parking lot signs, the legal hijinks feel suitably insulated from the mounting paranoia of the cartel storyline, where the disappearance of Lalo Salamanca rattles even the unflappable Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). 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. Steven Scaife
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
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
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
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. Anzhe Zhang
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, Severence is never didactic, and mercifully doesn’t feel like work. Ashton
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
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
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You should also review tv series from other countries (and include them in these best of the year lists). It is something we expect for the same Slant that has reviewed so many films from all over the world.
For the last years the danish were the best ones, now it’s impossible to not include the k-dramas.