My Top Ten Shows of 2022
This has been a really great year for TV–we saw a number of strong returns, from Bridgerton to Russian Doll to The White Lotus, but I think I’ll remember 2022 as the year that I found a ton of new favorites. It’s giving 2004/2016 with the number of excellent premieres, so it’s no huge surprise that all my top picks are new shows. Here’s what I think are the best ones:
One of my faves from early in the year is this comedy-mystery from Apple TV+. An ensemble cast is gathered at the swanky mansion for the afterparty following their high school reunion. The host, played to douchebag pop star perfection by Dave Franco, is pushed off the balcony to his death. A murder investigation led by Tiffany Haddish ensues, and so do shenanigans. The show ’s surprisingly tender in parts, but most of all, it deftly balances humor with cleverness. My favorite aspect is the way it goes all Rashomon: each suspect gets a POV episode, and a different film genre treatment. There’s noir, action-blockbuster, teen movie, etc., and it was such a fresh way to present a closed-circle mystery.
Severance
Severance from Apple TV+ is the kind of show that’s so good it gives me an inferiority complex. It’s a sci-fi psychological thriller, with dark comedic elements and not a small amount of surrealism, that tackles capitalism and our relationship with memory and identity. Yeah, it definitely sounds like something I would want to write. In this world, employees of a shady corporation can choose to sever their work memories from their personal memories, creating in essence two different people (an “innie” and outie” persona) that’s dependent on where one’s body is physically located. The production and sound design, the uncanny visual details, and the deadpan, detached acting of most of the characters really give the show a heightened sense of intrigue and dread. It also happens to feature one of the tensest finales I’ve seen in a long time; I was literally yelling at the screen. Trust the hype on this one.
Look, there were a lot of superhero shows and movies this year, but this one bests the rest. I really dig Moon Knight as a comics character and the Disney+ TV treatment made me like him even more. Oscar Isaac plays Marc Spector, a former mercenary who becomes an anti-hero of sorts as the avatar of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Speaking of severance and identity, our lead also suffers from dissociative identity disorder, which adds a rich layer to the oft-tread superhero question of where one persona ends and the other begins. It’s still got action and laughs, after all this is a Marvel property, but it’s also got a lot of heart. Toward the end of the season, there’s a really affecting episode about Marc’s childhood that made me cry. Even Endgame didn’t do that for me.
This one didn’t get a lot of buzz, and I consider it my duty to evangelize: this FX/Hulu show is a gem of a show. It’s a slow burn crime thriller set in 1980s Utah, where a devout Mormon mother and her baby girl are murdered in their home. What follows is a perilous investigation into the LDS Church, and a shocking look into the horrors of religious fundamentalism. Interspersed with the course of this investigation are vignettes about the history of the Mormon church, an artful way of adapting the nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer on which the show is based. Andrew Garfield plays the lead detective on the case, suffering from a crisis of faith as a devout Mormon himself. Garfield delivers some of the best acting I’ve ever seen on any medium this year, and I really hope more people see it.
I loved the show Black Sails so much that I was initially doubtful at the idea of a half-hour workplace comedy about the Golden Age of Piracy. Those doubts were quickly dispelled by this HBO Max show about the motley crew of the Revenge led by the Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet. It’s funny and silly and referential, but this one really stuck with me because the crew is so lovable and unforgettable. Every character in this show is so fully realized that months after watching it, I still find myself wondering about the lives of the crew. I’m most invested in Stede and the famous Blackbeard, a relationship that I didn’t expect would anchor the show.
Everyone had this show on their best-of lists, and for good reason. This dark comedy from FX/Hulu is about a struggling Chicago sandwich shop and its crew, told mostly from the POV of Carmy, a fine-dining chef who returns to his roots to run the family business after his brother’s death. I know I said Severance had one of the tensest finales, but episode seven of The Bear gives it a run for its money. That episode was such a technical feat that got my palms and temples dripping with sweat; I’ve rewatched it just to study how they did it, and it felt just as intense on second viewing. This shows also feels like one of those perfect single-season shows–a complete, satisfying, well-told story that makes me afraid that what follows will only dilute what’s come before.
I did not grow up reading The Sandman comics, and after watching this Netflix adaptation, I feel like I’ve lost something. Specifically, years of obsessing over a world and characters than I have only now met and am rightfully obsessed with. Tom Sturridge is perfectly cast as Morpheus, a powerful god with control over dreams. The season has a couple of overarching story threads that follows Morpheus on a quest to regain control of the dream world and contain horrors that have escaped from it, but aside from these bigger plots are (more or less) self-contained stories that are equally full of wonder and suspense and horror. I suppose this is the Year of the Tension because this show has one of the most stressful and harrowing episodes I’ve ever seen, “24/7”. As a writer I was so affected by the episode “Calliope” and I found the battle scene in “A Hope in Hell” so creative and unique. “The Sound of Her Wings” has impacted me in such a deep way that I’m currently writing a project inspired by it. Like I said, I’m obsessed.
We saw a lot of big fantasy shows this year, and while The Rings of Power faltered in the face of great expectations, HBO’s latest addition to the Game of Thrones universe did the opposite. As with many, I came into this show guarded, but it didn’t take long for my doubts to dissipate. It’s the Thrones we know, flaws and all, but it still has the stuff that makes the franchise compelling, and more. There’s palace intrigue, indelible, irredeemable characters, lore built on top of lore that I already know and love. And dragons! A lot more of them, and bigger too. The writing is also better than Rings or even early seasons of GOT–it’s tighter, lacking a sense of empty meandering. The show knows what it is, what its strengths are, and handily delivers them.
To me, this show is great merely by its willingness to make bold changes; that it succeeds in those changes is what makes it exceptional. At once a remix, and update and a sequel of the beloved Anne Rice novel, IWTV brings the story of Louis and Lestat into the modern era and recontextualizes what we think we know from the book story and the film story. The show then points to it, directly addressing the reframed, refreshed story, and by doing so it provides a commentary on the nature of memoirs and memories, especially of those in tumultuous, co-dependent, abusive relationships. The show does what adaptations should do–give you a little bit of the old, but more so something new and better.
This show is prestige television that only happens to also be a Star Wars franchise property. The production value is expectedly immersive. The cinematography is better than some movies, Star Wars or otherwise. It has top-notch, award-worthy acting: from Diego Luna as the titular rebel fighter, to Stellan Skarsgard, Genevieve O’Reilly, and Denise Gough (who was also great in Under the Banner of Heaven). And most importantly, it was written so exquisitely. It had the best opening scenes of any show or story, and guess what–it only got better from there. Cassian Andor’s story grows both in scope and in depth, introducing us to other characters and forces bigger than them all. The show realistically and humanely handled the heaviest of themes: from fascism and the police state, to extractive colonialism and the displacement of indigenous peoples, to the prison industrial complex, to the burdens and responsibilities of being in the resistance. This show manages to avoid feeling overloaded, and it efficiently portrays complicated situations without losing any heft or emotion. With “Narkina 5” and “Nobody’s Listening!”, Andor also gave me the best couple of hours of TV this year, with the rest of the season following closely behind. There’s so much more I want to write about this show and how it affected me, but suffice it to say, I can’t rave about Andor enough and I won’t stop any time soon.
Watch out in the next few days for my top reads of 2022 and other year-end roundups. - VM
Image credits: The Afterparty promo photo via Apple TV+; Under the Banner of Heaven promo photo via FX; The Sandman promo photo via Netflix; Andor promo photo via Disney+