Best TV Shows of 2022

All good picks, though I expect only 3-4 of them will make my Top 10.

Reservation Dogs is really good, though I think I'm still a touch cooler on the series than the critics. I disliked the first half of S1, and while the show has since delivered an abundance of memorable episodes, some of the weirdness just feels weird for the sake of it. (Particularly when it comes to some of the supporting characters.) Still, I love how each episode has its own distinct identity, and it's certainly one of the more interesting experimental shows on TV.

And I'm halfway through The Bear, and really digging it. Reminds me a bit of what the Safdies did with Uncut Gems, using tight camerawork and excessive profanity to make every scene as tense and stressful as possible. It's been such a great year for Hulu shows (including FX on Hulu), and this is no exception.

I like Reservation Dogs as well, I'm about halfway through Season 2. I'm not quite sure it's number 1 material with the level of television that has been offered this year. I don't mind the weirdness for the sake of weirdness but there's definitely times when the show seems to drag a little bit.

I also have a lot of shows to catch up on before I post my list, so it may be January or February for me. 

I also still have 4 episodes of Better Call Saul to go, and I think "Point and Shoot" might be my favourite episode of the series, which probably is not unrelated to the fact it is also the most Breaking Bad the series gets.

So I've assembled my (tentative) picks for the top 10 shows of the year. It splits pretty evenly down the line - five cable, five streaming. Five half-hour shows, five hourlong shows. (Runtimes can be quite elastic during the streaming era, but I consider pretty much any show with an average episode runtime below 40 minutes to be a "half-hour" series. That's not an official designation, but hey, Sherlock Jr. is technically a feature film. But I digress.)


Will post once I've written it all up. Meanwhile, here are my 10 favorite TV episodes of 2022, alphabetically by show:

Andor - "One Way Out"
Atlanta - "The Goof Who Sat By the Door"
The Bear - "Review"
Better Call Saul - "Plan and Execution"
The Dropout - "Old White Men"
The Rehearsal - "The Fielder Method"
Reservation Dogs - "Stay Gold Cheesy Boy"
Smiling Friends - "Mr. Frog"
Undone - "Rectify"
What We Do in the Shadows - "Go Flip Yourself"


As for worst shows of the year - the most mediocre shows I watched all the way through were mostly the Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney+ (only Andor rose above average). Book of Boba Fett was probably the weakest of the bunch; She-Hulk was bad too, but at least managed to be entertaining.

The Boys was certainly one of the weaker shows I watched this year - it says something when the animated anthology spinoff is more entertaining than the original series - though I still didn't think it was quite bad. It does raise my concerns about whether the series will be able to stick the landing, and also that said landing should probably come sooner rather than later. But given that there's a live-action spinoff coming next year, I expect Amazon wants to keep the series around for a while (particularly since they can't survive on Rings of Power alone).

Smiling Friends is a very funny animated series that flew under the radar for most folks, even in TV circles (in part since Adult Swim dropped all the episodes in one night, with little fanfare). I wrote a little about it on the animation thread. It's the peak of Internet-era trollism in TV form, blending creative animation with random "gotcha!" moments that create a sense of chaotic silliness. Probably not for every taste, but it made me laugh harder than just about anything else this year. And an easy watch, with just nine episodes at 11 minutes each.

I take all of these TV lists with a heaping mound of salt anyways, given critics' tendencies to take high-quality long-running shows for granted, often by overemphasizing "hot new shows" that tend to burn out quickly.  Like, I don't care if someone found Season 3 of Atlanta a bit of a mixed-bag (on account  of the anthology episodes) or not:  it finished so strongly in its final season that I don't believe for a second that most of these other shows compare favourably to it overall.

For instance, I think The Bear was effective enough as a one-season premise, but I doubt it's going to sustain its appeal long-term, because many of the character interactions, even in the first season, are more irritating than compelling (sometimes the intent, but it has a short shelf-life as drama, IMO).  As for Andor, franchise-related shows often go off-the-rails before too long, and by most accounts, it only got really good in its back-half.  I think they'll basically prove to be flavour-of-the-months. 

I try my best to look at all the shows on a year-by-year basis when I'm making my annual lists, though I admit it is tempting to focus more on fresh new shows that are doing new and interesting things, rather than ongoing shows that continue to do their usual interesting things as they did before. With Atlanta, it's an unusual case of trying to weigh two seasons at once. Had the show only aired Season Three this year, it would be off my list entirely (and I say this as someone who liked a couple of the anthology episodes! I just found the general narrative to lack the distinct identity and purpose of the other seasons); had it only aired Season Four, it would easily be in my top 5. So I'm left trying to split the difference between two seasons of markedly different quality while reconciling them against other shows that only aired one (very good or great) season this year.

As for the new 2022 debuts that may fizzle out in the future, the one I'm most concerned about is Severance - loved S1, but it's absolutely the kind of show that could drop hard in quality if the puzzles don't yield satisfactory answers, or if the character arcs start running in place to sustain the mystery. The Bear seems more malleable, though it will be tough to keep the same level of stress-inducing chaos across multiple seasons.

I don't really have concerns about the future of Andor, because despite that show's problems (boring title character, bloated runtime), the writers have evidently planned things out in advance, and have already confirmed that Season Two will be the show's last. It will apparently include multiple time-jumps leading to the events of Rogue One, which I'm not thrilled about, but the show has proven to be one of the more interesting and effective Star Wars productions over the last couple decades, so I'll definitely stick around and see where it goes.