It was the year of the great streaming correction, when Netflix, HBO Max, and other platforms made signs that they may dial back on the tiers upon tiers of programming they’ve been piling on our TVs. But in 2022 we could still revel in a world in which we were showered with quality series: Here are our favorite original, hilarious, surprising, dramatic and groundbreaking shows of the year — the best TV shows of 2022.
Severance
It’s become all too common for directors of blockbuster films to cite film-school classics while doing press for their cinematic-universe spackle. How refreshing, then, for director Ben Stiller to actually deliver, in the Apple TV+ show Severance, a legit and crackling melding of the workplace comedy and ‘70s paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View and All the President’s Men. What starts as an amusing thought experiment—what if your work life and home life were kept powerfully separate?—quickly lurches into funky sci-fi thriller territory, an exercise in creepy world-building unmatched by basically anything else on TV this year.
The Boys
Superheroes, satire and the most gory, disturbing applications of superpowers imaginable: Three seasons in, Amazon’s The Boys knows how to give you what you came for. Yes, the show may be reaching a point where the mix of shock and meta references is too desensitizing to truly have an effect, but that hardly matters when Antony Starr is still putting up an Emmy-worthy performance as an invincible SuperTrump, and the addition of Jensen Ackles’ tortured Captain America stand-in shakes up the drama just enough to add a few new dimensions. The Boys is walking a tightrope that gets harder to maintain with each exploding butthole or Kendall Jenner reference, but so far, they haven’t stumbled.
The White Lotus
Mike White returned with a sumptuous second season of his HBO anthology series about miserable rich people on beautiful vacations … and this one also happens to be a murder mystery. This time around, he leaves Hawaii behind for a resort in Sicily and hones in on matters of the heart (or, more accurately, the loins). We get deadpan bon mots from Aubrey Plaza. We get a farting F. Murray Abraham. We get possible wife-swapping and Michael Imperioli in killer shades and an Italian actress actually named Simona Tabasco. And, of course, we get impeccable line readings from Jennifer Coolidge. Event television at its finest.
The Bear
The Bear was a true sleeper hit, a quiet Hulu release that went on to become the monster show of the summer. Its scrappy rise suits the story: a boy-wonder gourmet chef named Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) returns home to Chicago after his brother’s death to take over the family beef-sandwich joint. The supporting cast is a flawless melting pot of enormous personalities you love to watch work and fight; Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), the ambitious sous chef; Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the dirtbag pain-in-the-ass “cousin”; Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), the old hand who’s sick of everyone’s shit, to name just a few. Much has been made about the authenticity, the menswear, and, of course, how thirsty everyone is for Carmy. Give in to the siren song of calling everyone, “Chef.”
Hacks
Long live the buddy comedy. In Hacks season two, caustic boomer comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and in-her-feelings Gen Z writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) are out on the road and still at each other’s throats. This season dials up the cringe comedy and, best of all, gives more HBO screen time to Megan Stalter as Kayla, the most glorious nepotism-baby assistant of them all.
Atlanta
For their last trick, leave it to Donald Glover, his brother Stephen and Co. to subvert expectations yet again, this time by making Atlanta more or less straightforward again after last season’s huge creative swerve. Of course, a normal season of this genre-bending series still involved random horror overtones, Donald in heavy prosthetics, a killer inspired by Soulja Boy, and a mythical hunt for…D’Angelo. But hey, an episode where only one main character appears is still more welcoming than season 3, which stacked four episodes where no main characters appear. In season 4, the team went back to the basics while still delivering TV that is anything but. It was almost cruel: meeting Van and Earn’s daughter Lottie as a fully fleshed-out character, seeing Earn and Alfred’s extended family play off of each other for the first time, and watching Alfred as Paper Boy deal with the low points of being a popular rapper (like ducking wack collaborators) made it hard not to feel like ending at four is too little, too soon. But when the result is a season with no misses that makes a poignant statement for every character and delivers a perfect series finale, it was clear that as always, Team Atlanta had the alchemy already figured out.
Better Call Saul
History has shown how difficult it is to stick the landing of a prestige drama. Which makes it exponentially unfathomable that the team behind Breaking Bad has now done it twice—the second time with a prequel, no less, a format that has proven so reliably unsatisfying. (Let us never speak of The Many Saints of Newark again.) Better Call Saul debuted seven years ago on AMC with the difficult goal of making us care about BB’s most cartoonish character. Even after so brilliantly laying out the origin story of Bob Odenkirk’s Technicolor lawyer for five seasons, the question remained as the show began its sixth and final run: How do you leave viewers moved by a life story they already know ends in deserved defeat? By exploring just how critical a tether his life (and crime) partner Kim Wexler, played by the sublime Rhea Seehorn, was to Jimmy McGill’s ever-dwindling traces of humanity. Questions were answered, cons were hatched, and we got as satisfyingly happy an ending as the Breaking Bad universe gets. It was so good that it left our writers debating whether the series was actually better than its hall-of-fame predecessor.
Andor
The original Star Wars trilogy was great for many reasons, but two come to mind: first, because George Lucas shamelessly borrowed from great material (Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon, Kurosawa); and second, because the production design—all those beat-up ships and gleaming corridors—was incredibly sick. Andor understands these things in a way that no other recent Star Wars material has. The Disney+ show is dense with allusions to movie history (and just regular history), while the world it takes place in feels powerfully real. (The guy who bangs the anvil to keep the time!) The plot is fine, and the characters are reasonably interesting—but it’s really the deeply-developed world they inhabit that makes Andor one of the best shows of the year.
The Patient
“A therapist is locked in a basement by a serial killer who won’t let the doctor go until he cures the murderer’s bloodlust” feels like the logline for a 1990s Bruce Willis film. (One that ends with Willis quipping, “I’m sorry, but our hour is up,” before caving in his captor’s head with a bust of Freud.) But the FX miniseries The Patient was something far smarter and more haunting. Steve Carell played the chained psychiatrist, a grieving widow estranged from his grown son who had become a hardcore Orthodox Jew. Domhnall Gleeson was the antisocial killer (a rule-bound food inspector by day) desperate for conversion but barely able to grasp human emotions. It was so much more than a game of cat and mouse: It was cat and mouse and religion and faith and parenthood and human connection and a finale that defied expectations. (Plus: a drama with half-hour episodes! More of those, please.)
The Rehearsal
It turns out Nathan for You was just a warm-up for Man of the Year Nathan Fielder’s ultimate experiment in satirizing empowerment reality shows. The HBO “reality (?)” series begins with a framework that is straightforward in concept, and absurdly elaborate in practice: Nathan helps a real person prepare for a dreaded confrontation by having them rehearse all possible outcomes beforehand with actors, on sets that are meticulous recreations of the future encounter’s location. (I can not overemphasize just how comically byzantine these recreations are.) Fielder is a cipher of a host/participant: He explores his own neuroses and self-doubt, but does so with a blank affect that only seems to magnify the quirks of his unpolished subjects, none of whom have the camera-ready flash you’d find on a Bravo show. Is The Rehearsal a celebration of awkwardness and a commentary on regret? Or an elaborate and cruel Candid Camera in which the participants know that they’re on camera, but not why? A viewer is never sure of anything, other than that this is one of the most original and surprising comedies in years.
Under the Banner of Heaven
Based on Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name, Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven examines a brutal double murder that took place in an insular Mormon community in the 1980s, while threading in flashbacks to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in America. Andrew Garfield is masterful as Detective Jeb Pyre, a Mormon undergoing his own crisis of faith throughout the investigation, and getting to see Wyatt Russell play a chilling weirdo instead of a chill bro is a welcome departure. Sure, there will always be a new gritty, brooding true-crime murder mystery to watch—but this is one of the few that actually gets under your skin.
Abbott Elementary
Set at a struggling Philadelphia public school kept alive by a staff that—mostly—does the job out of love, ABC’s Abbott Elementary understands that the little details matter. That’s apparent both in background gags (always be sure to read each classroom’s chalkboards) and in plots built around the minutiae of teaching, like an episode in which the attempts of earnest second-grade teacher Janine (creator Quinta Brunson) to introduce a new brand of juice to the lunchroom has butterfly effect-like consequences on the school’s plumbing. At once heartfelt and clear-eyed about the world it depicts, Abbott Elementary has not only proven there’s still life in the network sitcom (and the mockumentary). A season-and-a-half into its run, it already feels like an all-timer.
Tokyo Vice
The 2019 announcement that Michael Mann would direct a TV pilot called Tokyo Vice was enough to send Mann men and women worldwide into a state of hyperventilation. Our bard of taciturn and macho crime, working on a project about taciturn and macho crime in Japan? It seemed pulled directly from my thriller and crime-novel-addled brain, and too good to be true. When the show dropped on HBO Max earlier this year, it was easy to be nervous: Ansel Elgort (uh-oh) playing a gaijin reporter (double uh-oh) struggling to make sense of the ways and customs of the mystifying Far East (triple uh-oh)? But even more unlikely than this show making it to release was the fact that: It’s so good! Elgort is excellent as the cocky, moderately talented Jake Adelstein (a real journalist whose memoir provided the show’s source material). The yakuza are amazing. There’s a subplot about Mormonism, for some reason, but it kind of works? And, in true Mann fashion, the whole thing is moody and fluorescent and insanely cool, often at the expense of narrative cohesion. I’d have it no other way.
P-Valley
Following the lives of the employees working at a Chucalissa strip club called the Pynk, Starz’ P-Valley is provocative, intoxicating, and stunningly, specifically, real. It’s an edgy and layered drama; a cousin to The Player’s Club with the sparkling visuals of Hustlers or Zola, and the kind of Southern storytelling you find in Queen Sugar. Creator Katori Hall presents the lives of the strippers not through the eyes of Pynk’s paying customers, but through the Black female gaze, creating three-dimensional characters with full lives and specific, complicated ambitions that bring up questions of morality, vulnerability, power, and consent. Those themes all get amplified in season 2, with a collection of episodes that take on broad topics like COVID, or complicate the sometimes tense relationship between Blackness and queerness, but also incisively delve into Southern-specific topics like hoodoo traditions. P-Valley is a cocktail of drama, humor, sex and cultural relevance with a Southern twist quite unlike anything we’ve seen before. It’s easily one of the most underrated series out right now.
Reservation Dogs
There’s nothing on TV quite like FX’s Reservation Dogs: an irreverent, touching, and sometimes surreal depiction of Native American life created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. The show follows the exploits of four aimless teenagers—Bear (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai); Elora (Devery Jacobs); Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis); and Cheese (Lane Factor)—from a reservation in the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma. Season two finds them more scattered, but still all excavating their grief from the death of the fifth member of their group, Daniel.
Winning Time
It’s 1979, and the NBA is in the pits when a charismatic chemist named Jerry Buss buys the Lakers and turns them into an unstoppable dynasty, reviving the league in the process. HBO’s Winning Time tells this story with all the flash and swagger and showboating it deserves. Newcomers Quincy Isaiah and Solomon Hughes nail Magic and Kareem, respectively, and Jason Clarke makes a surprisingly hilarious Jerry West, to the delight of the viewer—and the chagrin of Jerry West. John C. Reilly, who should really be in everything always, plays a pitch-perfect Buss. (Don’t get us started on his shirts.) Get past the fourth-wall-breaking and you’ll be rewarded with pure, non-stop entertainment.
Ozark
As the back half of Netflix’s final season of Ozark begins, Wendy and Marty Byrde (Laura Linney and Jason Bateman) have nearly completed their kooky evolution from nearly-divorced Chicago couple to prominent southeast crime family to Clintonesque political dynasty. To get across the finish line, they’ll need to: delicately manage relationships with both a cartel boss and the FBI; prevent a PI from digging into a murder they committed; raise a boatload of money to launch their family foundation and become political kingmakers, possibly requiring the subversion of democracy; prevent their friend and onetime ward Ruth Langmore from blowing everything up; and convince their children that they are not psychopaths, which of course they are. Oddly enough, the last season gets off to a slow, meandering start. But by the time Marty, among the more legendarily passive antiheroes in television history, finds himself beating the pulp out of a sorry motorist, it’s clear that we’re back in Ozark country, where the blood is hot and flows easily.
Borgen: Power and Glory
More Borgen! (Morgen?) After nearly a decade’s hiatus, the globally beloved political drama long hyped as the Danish West Wing (but, you know, way less annoying) finally came back to Netflix for a new season. Former prime minister Birgette Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is now the foreign minister and dealing with a quickly unfolding environmental crisis in Greenland. Enjoy: seeing favorite characters return, the never-ending scheming and backstabbing, and the challenge of still trying to figure out exactly how a parliamentary democracy works.
Industry
The short pitch for HBO’s Industry could be “Billions, but make it young, cool, and preposterously horny.” If season one of the financial-workplace drama had niche appeal, then season two, which premiered in August, cemented the show as a must-watch. It finds the Pierrepoint & Co grads—led by standouts Myha’la Herrold as Harper and Marisa Abela as Yasmin—older, more assured, and still playing around with mind-boggling amounts of money (and drugs). Not a quiet quitter in sight.
Slow Horses
What if you blended the morally complex spy novels of John Le Carré with the acid bureaucratic satire of Veep? You’d get something a lot like Slow Horses, which focuses on a group of would-be spies who’ve flunked out of MI5 and now spend their days sitting around a satellite office called Slough House. At first, Apple TV+’s Slow Horses feels like a dark, genre-inflicted take on the workplace sitcom, with Gary Oldman’s over-the-hill Jackson Lamb flinging insults at his subordinates. But then they find themselves smack in the middle of a fast-moving conspiracy, and the show shifts gears into a proper spy thriller. It’s tense, funny, and sharp as all hell.
The Dropout
This year, scripted miniseries went all in on schadenstreaming, reveling in the downfall of tech gurus. Super Pumped tut-tutted Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and WeCrashed shamed WeWork’s Adam Neumann. But Hulu’s The Dropout was far more than just a primer on hubris, a buildup to a comedown viewers were hungry to see played out. Amanda Seyfried’s riveting, (literally) unblinking inhabitation of Theranos’ disrupter-in-chief Elizabeth Holmes avoided a simplistic verdict. Was Holmes a con artist? A psychopath? Or just a smart person with a good-in-theory idea who was seduced by the ambient Silicon Valley mentality that a good mogul doesn’t wait for results to start making money?
I Love That For You
A gleefully demented workplace comedy created by and starring a post-SNL Vanessa Bayer, Showtime’s I Love That For You centers on a woman named Joanna Gold who realizes her dreams of landing a job at a QVC-esque home shopping channel. When she promptly loses it, she is welcomed back after she blurts out that she has cancer. The problem is, that’s not quite true: Yes, she had leukemia as a child, but she fully recovered. These episodes go down easy, especially with a supporting cast that includes the great Molly Shannon, who continues her recent TV hot streak as the kooky reigning queen of televised home shopping.
Barry
Barry was never as simple as the shorthand descriptor “Bill Hader’s hitman comedy” would imply; it mixed together Hollywood satire, absurdist crime saga, and startling bursts of violence, with action that could be visceral and disconcertingly surreal. After a three-year hiatus, Barry returned to HBO this April with even more dimensions. As Barry remained a bland sociopath, the writers probed more deeply at the pain of all of those around him, with Henry Winkler a standout among the cast’s standouts: His false-god acting guru Gene Cousineau grappled with his fear of former student Barry, rage, and regret over a life led dickishly. The finale ended with a shocking reveal: May Hader and Berg write faster this time!