Best TV of 2022
As much as I feel like I saw a lot of movies last year, it turns out I spent far more time watching TV shows. 2022 was an absolute avalanche of good stuff on TV, and I doggedly tried to keep up with it as much as possible. Do I regret it? Maybe? So much of it was really good, though... I ended up seeing 89 shows that aired in 2022, including a couple standup specials (which maybe I should have put into the movie list instead?) but not including talk shows (shout-out to Wil Wheaton's The Ready Room).
Turns out it's pretty difficult to rank shows against each other, especially things as varied as reality game shows, documentary miniseries, and whatever The Rehearsal is, or even just comparing dramas and comedies. I'm not going to wimp out like the Golden Globes and split them up, though, so I put them all in order from best to worst. But even at the very top, I had a really hard time picking between Severance and Andor for my #1 show; they're both pretty awesome and special and I'm incredibly psyched for season 2 of them both. But I decided not to call it a tie, so I'm going with Severance. Congrats, Ben Stiller.
Anyway, take the relative rankings with a grain of salt, especially the five shows I haven't yet finished, marked with an asterisk in the list below (I was tempted to wait until I finished them all, but the year is fast receding into the rearview mirror and I wanted to stay somewhat fresh here). But to a first approximation, here's how much I liked these shows. And similar to my movie list, I do have good feelings about everything on here except for the bottom few, and even those I don't regret watching, I just... had higher hopes when I started them.
- Severance
- Star Wars: Andor
- The Afterparty
- House of the Dragon
- Reservation Dogs S2
- Barry S3
- Irma Vep
- Better Call Saul S6
- Peacemaker
- Russian Doll S2
- Slow Horses S1
- The Rehearsal
- The English
- Ms. Marvel
- This is Going to Hurt
- Star Trek: Lower Decks S3
- The Sandman
- Atlanta S4
- The Peripheral
- The Resort
( 21-89 )
For the curious, here's a few more 2022 stragglers still on my to-watch list:
- Slow Horses S2
- Minx
- Extraordinary Attorney Woo
- Outer Range
- Paper Girls
- Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
- Angelyne
- 1923
- Bad Sisters
- Black Bird
- Snake in the Grass
- Ozark, Euphoria, The Boys, The Crown - haven't started any of these yet, multiple seasons behind!