The year 2022 saw the return of the water cooler moment (if such a thing exists in our post-pandemic, hybrid work lives), with The White Lotus sending the chattering classes (and their TikTok) equivalents) into a collective frenzy of whodunnit enthusiasms on Mondays. Who knew that our fractured attention could be so collectively captured by Sunday night entertainment? It’s enough to revive a small-screen enthusiast’s waning attention span.
But even if la dolce not-so-vita wasn’t your cup of tea, there was an abundance of quality entertainment to be consumed on television and laptop screens this year, from critically acclaimed half-hour comedies like ABC’s Abbott Elementary, to the return of HBO favorites including My Brilliant Friend, Industry, and Barry, and brand new word-of-mouth hits (Yellowjackets, The Bear). To some, The Crown felt like homework—albeit with a slanted take on history and a far-too-handsome Prince Charles. To others, it was the welcome return of a gilded modern classic. The Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon, and Amazon Prime Video’s lavish new Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power offered fantastical escape.
As the golden age of TV continues apace, you can find all the best TV shows of 2022 right here.
Just when I was feeling lost in a mid-season miasma of Real Housewives reruns and audiobooks of celebrity memoirs, salvation arrived in TV form—or, in the form of Quinta Brunson’s sitcom Abbott Elementary, to be specific. The show, which stars Brunson as a second-grade teacher in an underfunded Philadelphia school, is laugh-out-loud funny, painfully real, and will be familiar to almost anyone with experience navigating the complex and often fraught U.S. school system. Abbott Elementary’s awards-season nomination sweep proves what loyal viewers have always known: This show is an absolute gem. —Emma Specter
Bill Hader’s half-hour comedy-thriller had a miraculous third season on HBO Max–transforming from a good show with something of a niche following, to a great one. Hader’s striving Hollywood actor slash hitman is stolid and irreparably damaged, a portrait of venality and desperation, and Sarah Goldberg as Barry’s girlfriend Sally gives the most incandescent performance of rage and vulnerability and desperation I’ve seen this year. Barry, through its twisty plotlines (involving warring mobs and a hapless police investigation), has incredible tension and an oddball grace, and is coming back for a fourth season (thank God). It’s a series in full flight, and taking more chances than anything else on television. —Taylor Antrim
If you haven’t yet watched The Bear, you’re missing out. Since its premiere, it’s spawned a raft of internet content, with restaurant workers weighing in on its authenticity, deep dives into Carmy’s closet, and even a New Yorker cartoon. The bland logline—a burnt-out high-end chef returns to his Chicago roots to run a struggling sandwich joint—belies the series’ heart and depth, not to mention sharp performances from Ayo Odebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach (best known as Girls’ Desi), and Jeremy Allen White (a.k.a. Sexually Competent Dirtbag Line Cook) and excellent cameos by Oliver Platt, Jon Bernthal, and Joel McHale. It’s a workplace show, sure, but more so it’s about family, traditions, respect, trauma, grief, gentrification, foodie culture, and a restaurant’s constant battle to stay afloat—a message worth remembering now perhaps more than ever. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
There’s no TV drama as precisely made and carefully plotted as Better Call Saul–which is a little sad given that this beloved series ended its run this summer. In the sixth and final season Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn as the titular Saul Goodman and Kim Wexler continued to have astonishing chemistry, and the ratcheting tension behind the rise of Gus Fring’s Albequerque drug empire was a thing to behold. The final episodes were straight-up masterpieces—nerve-rattlingly tense, moving and then in the series's last moments, quietly profound. A total delight. —T.A.
The political drama Borgen first aired on Danish TV in 2010, when TV’s golden era was still on the upswing, quickly becoming a hit across Europe. I, like many people, finally got around to bingeing it after Netflix bought rights to the show in 2020 and put all three seasons on its platform. It has the immersive quality of a great soap opera—flawed but fascinating characters—and its complex plotlines, wrapping up Danish climate policy, worker’s rights, and international relations, bore only a dash of the idealism that occasionally made The West Wing too corny for words. The fourth season arrived this year with a shift in tone—but while it now looks a little like other Scandi-noir dramas that have emerged since its inaugural run, Borgen remains in a league of its own: Crisp, intelligent, and thrillingly addictive. —T.A.
The latest chapter of The Crown continues the brilliantly brutal dissection of Charles and Diana’s collapsing marriage, with Dominic West playing the Prince of Wales and Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki, her downcast-chin-upward-eye head position honed to uncanny resemblance, playing Princess Diana. The season covers—with widely varying degrees of fidelity to actual events—Charles and Diana's “second honeymoon,” the intimate phone call between Charles and Camilla that leaked to the tabloids and has lived in dubious infamy ever since, Diana's explosive interview with Martin Bashir. For such sexy source material, *The Crown—*this season especially—can sometimes feel quite staid. But for sheer production value, and if you're committed to this many-season masterful depiction of royal life, it is required viewing. —Chloe Schama
Villain origin stories, the tack du jour for reviving old I.P., answer a simple question—How did such-and-such a bad guy get to be quite so bad?—and, as franchise-spawning films like Maleficent, Joker, and Cruella have proven, they have legs. Where the worst examples feel trite, the good ones are engaging and expansive, adding colors to a narrative one hardly knew were missing. Starz’s Dangerous Liaisons is a good one, inventing a richly realized prologue for Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel of the same name. A splendidly costumed Alice Englert is the Marquise de Merteuil, avenging the heartbreak she suffered at the hands of the Vicomte de Valmont (Nicholas Denton) through wiles she learned from a wise, if embittered, older ally and mentor (Lesley Manville) as she navigates 18th-century French society. —Marley Marius
The Dropout is a show that manages to do the impossible, making Elizabeth Holmes sympathetic. Well, maybe that’s a bit strong, but the Hulu series does complicate the public perception of the embattled Theranos founder, with Amanda Seyfried shining in a performance that should remind us all that even the most fearsome Silicon Valley titans (and frauds) are really just awkward high-schoolers in Izods at heart. —E.S.
Based on the first season of Slate’s hit podcast Slow Burn, Starz’s extremely enjoyable and brilliantly cast history lesson about the Watergate fallout is an astonishingly starry series, with a cast led by Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell, the unexpectedly heroic society wife of President Nixon’s reelection chair John Mitchell, played by Sean Penn—or at least I think that’s Penn, peeking out from beneath a slag heap of latex. The acting in Gaslit never quits—but let’s be honest, you’re coming for Julia Roberts, and she doesn’t disappoint. She is vulnerable one moment, silly the next, and then unmistakably smarter than the power brokers she’s surrounded by, exuding that Erin Brockovich charisma and adding to this series’s confident glow. —T.A.
When Hacks premiered on HBO Max last summer, in the middle of the pandemic, it felt like a perfectly timed comedic treat for the moment. The deliciously vicious series follows the clash of personalities between the legendary comedienne Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), who has lost her residency on the Las Vegas strip, and the recently canceled millennial writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder), who she’s forced to collaborate with in order to spice up her act. The show’s second season, which sees the duo head out on tour, is leavened with some more profound questions as the central relationship between Deborah and Ava faces some major bumps in the road. It’s proof positive (if you needed it) that Hacks is more than just a bold generational comedy, also unpicking deeper emotional truths about the sexism and ageism that women working in the entertainment industry are faced with to this day. —Liam Hess
The first season of I Hate Suzie saw the inimitable Billie Piper making a series of increasingly awful decisions as Suzie, an actor who has worked since childhood but is also struggling to maintain relevance and keep her sanity while rattling around a ramshackle Cotswold cottage with her truly heinous husband, played with delicious relish by Daniel Ings. I Hate Suzie had its characters exhibiting the kind of bad-to-worse behavior that is both wretched and riveting to watch—and paradoxically keeps you rooting for its titular character. In the second season, Piper is perhaps more unhinged, but more watchable than ever, giving her all to a Dancing with the Stars-style reality TV competition, and failing spectacularly. Somehow, the show still feels like a success. —C.S.
It’s safe to say that Game of Thrones fans were approaching the possibility of returning to Westeros this year with a fair degree of skepticism, after the blockbuster fantasy epic reached a disappointing conclusion back in 2017. But with House of the Dragon—set 200 years before the events of the original series, and charting the family conflicts and palace intrigue leading up to the collapse of the Targaryen dynasty—the show’s transportive magic returned in full, fiery force, this time as a Greek tragedy with added dragons. A gripping and often surprisingly intimate portrait of power, pride, betrayal, and lust tearing a family in two (emphasis on lust in particular—the copious amounts of incest required a strong stomach) House of the Dragon’s greatest strength was also the stellar performances from its cast; in particular, Emma D’Arcy, whose blazingly furious stare in the show’s final scene is still seared in my memory two months later.—L.H.
When Industry premiered in the fall of 2020, it felt like Euphoria at a London investment bank—a sex-and-drugs bacchanal full of attractive Gen Z junior bankers, all of whom were moving millions by day and their frequently naked bodies by night. But the series was chillier and less attention-grabbing than Euphoria—and had none of the bombast of a one-percent show like, say, Billions. It wasn’t a great show yet in Season 1—it had more mood than heart—but it was a very, very cool one, with a headlong energy that hit like a drug high. Season 2 is a massive leap forward. There are new characters, higher narrative stakes, and the cast of young actors—Myha’la Herrold as Harper and Marisa Abela as Yasmin in particular—give, to my mind, the most exciting performances on television. You can still come for the sex and drugs (the new season has some startlingly hot moments), but you’ll stay for the way Industry nails post-lockdown anxiety, satirizes shifting workplace mores, and amps up power reversals at its fictional Pierpoint & Co, where everyone is busy trading moments of supremacy and control. —T.A.
In Irma Vep—Olivier Assayas’s enthralling adaptation of his 1996 film—an American movie star named Mira (Alicia Vikander, effortlessly seductive) leads a remake of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial from 1915-1916. Helming the production is the mercurial René Vidal (a brilliantly nervy Vincent Macaigne), and as the chaotic shoot goes on, the lines between fact and fiction, actor and character, become dangerously blurred, zig-zagging between satire and a full-throated exaltation of the power of cinema. Assayas fans will get the most out of the series, which is dense with allusions to the filmmaker’s own life and work—but anyone keen on stylish industry dramas (think Call My Agent!) would do well to tune in, too. —M.M.
No stranger to a high-profile marriage himself, Ethan Hawke summoned the wattage of George Clooney, Laura Linney, Zoe Kazan, Sam Rockwell, and many (many!) more to make The Last Movie Stars, a thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining tribute to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Mining the transcripts from a memoir project Newman started and summarily abandoned, the six-part series examines one of the most legendary partnerships in Hollywood history, from the affair that started their relationship to the professional jealousy and alcohol abuse that almost destroyed it. (Married for 50 years, the pair ultimately raised six children and made 16 films together.) Come for the fascinating movie history, stay to see some of the biggest actors working geek out over their heroes. —M.M.
It’s strange to think of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend as underdog TV—but this exquisitely made Italian series, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s decade-old Neapolitan quartet of novels, feels more respected than seen. What a shame if true. There’s simply no more beautifully produced series on TV, no more moving exploration of ambition, class, loyalty, and female friendship. And the third season is a revelation–stunning in its 1970s detail and even more heightened with narrative tension, sex appeal, and the threat of political violence. There’s no jumping in cold: Start from season one if you haven’t given My Brilliant Friend a try. It remains very popular in Italy, but something of a niche pleasure here. Perhaps its ravishing third season will change that. —T.A.
Few TV shows this year carried the same sweeping ambition as Soo Hugh’s dazzling adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s epic work of historical fiction Pachinko, the bestselling novel charting the fates of three generations of a Korean family across the 20th century, from their colonized homeland to a war-torn Japan and far beyond. It’s a sumptuous, emotionally charged rollercoaster that manages to balance character-driven intimacy with the broader strokes of East Asia’s checkered 20th-century history, adapting a sprawling story into something gripping and impressively coherent. —L.H.
The workplace has long been fertile ground for television, but I’ve never seen anything quite like Severance. The points of reference for this satire-thriller on Apple TV+ are not new—gritty '70s paranoia thriller meets genial office comedy meets dystopian sci-fi. But its nine episodes, written by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, shift gears so easily and with such chilly aplomb that they feel like something machine-made for 2022. Expertly acted and absorbing (if not especially fast paced), Severance is so calibrated to current-day anxieties that I couldn’t stop watching it. For all of the money Apple has invested in its still fledgling TV+ service, I would argue it has yet to serve up a must-watch prestige drama series. Severance could be it. —T.A.
BritBox is one of many niche offerings in the streaming world, but if you’re into U.K. telly, this subscription offers just about the richest selection of shows you can find. For evidence see Sherwood, an elegantly constructed procedural about a series of murders in Nottinghamshire which is based on real events from 2004, and is one of the most complex and satisfying dramas of the year. When a retired member of a mining union is killed in the street by a crossbow bolt to the chest, tensions from decades-old labor strikes begin to boil over. Politics and family secrets surface as the investigation winds its way through the local community. The strongest pleasure here is in the cast, with subtly powerful performances from U.K. acting stalwarts David Morrissey, Lesley Manville, and Robert Glenister. —T.A.
Le Carré lite? A thinking person’s Homeland? I kept trying to situate the tone and mood of the terrific espionage thriller on Apple TV+, Slow Horses, which is zippy, mordant, a little silly, bracingly violent in places, and extremely British in its celebration of irascibility, rainy London streets, geopolitical decline, and governing class contemptibility. Two seasons were released this year—both based on Mick Herron’s fleet-footed Slough House novels and featuring a collection of MI5 losers and misfits, intelligence officers who have made a mistake, failed to excel, or otherwise displeased their bosses, and have been shunted off to a forgotten London bureau to molder in irrelevancy. The head of this satellite division, nicknamed Slough House (because it might as well be located in Slough), is Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), an unkempt, past-it field officer, who spends his days inside last-week’s clothes and a glass of whisky. Oldman is having a wonderful time as the disheveled, cranky, secretly brilliant Lamb, insulting everyone who comes near his office, nursing grudges, and holding his cards extremely close to the vest. He has a small team of third-tier agents working for him, including the sprightly River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), whose grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) is a well-bred spymaster with a sterling reputation. Each episode is popcorn-light but beautifully done and just sophisticated enough to feel like an evening well spent. —T.A.
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I wonder if anyone except the hardest of hard-core Euro TV fans are watching Sweden’s relentless crime thriller Snabba Cash, but this hidden gem on Netflix, now in its second season, is due for a breakout. A gender-flipped reimagining of a decade-old Swedish crime-film trilogy, which is itself inspired by a trio of best-selling novels by Jens Lapidus, Snabba Cash is the kind of fast-moving genre series you binge over a weekend, and immediately text your friends about. Do not expect the standard Nordic noir tropes of fjords and frozen corpses. Here, Stockholm is a teemingly modern city of drug wars, hyper-capitalism, and haves and have-nots. Our heroine is Leya, a single mom and tech entrepreneur from humble circumstances, who gets caught up in Stockholm’s crime underworld. As played by Evin Ahmad, she is tough and glamorous but also appealingly human—and her attempt to save her business and herself in the process is thrilling. The supporting actors in both seasons are excellent too: especially Dada Fungula Bozela as drug lord Ravy (with an astonishing collection of streetwear) and his loyal number-two, Nala (played by Ayaan Ahmed). —T.A.
Ever since Big Little Lies became a TV phenomenon, HBO has cleared a lane for well-heeled crime dramas that are addicting as they are ludicrous. And now comes The Staircase, which shares DNA with the above: A-list cast, interesting director (Antonio Campos, whose film Christine has echoes here), a story that wraps up privilege, legal wrangling, and violent death in a handsome eight-part package. But the surprise of The Staircase is how subtle, clever, and searching it is, not the least because of its fascinating source material, the award-winning 2005 television documentary series by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade following the defense team of Michael Peterson, the Durham, North Carolina writer who was convicted of murdering his wife at the base of his home’s staircase. The Staircase winds up being a meta-text more than a murder mystery—and it’s a riveting one. —T.A.
Starring the reliably excellent Ben Whishaw as a beleaguered doctor working on the maternity ward of an underfunded, understaffed hospital within Britain’s National Health Service, this dramatization of Adam Kay’s bestselling autobiographical book deftly balances pitch-black humor with an urgent political message. Its barbed love letter to an institution that has found itself on its knees thanks to ongoing privatization may read on paper as a tale specific to its British makers (the show first aired in the U.K. on the BBC earlier this year), but with maternal health in the conversation in the U.S. too, its razor-sharp indictment of a broken medical system feels both universally relevant and eerily timely. —L.H.
A Very British Scandal is a deftly wicked retelling of the 1963 divorce case that erupted around Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, played with earthbound insouciance by Claire Foy, and her scoundrel of a husband, Ian Campbell, Duke of Argyll (Paul Bettany, lethal in sunglasses and tweeds). The Duke seduces the fabulously wealthy Margaret with his castle at Inveraray, marries her, and then robs her like a bank. Margaret strikes back with affairs—Foy’s offhand, unashamed embodiment of female desire is the kindling of this show. The famous photograph at the heart of the subsequent court case is Margaret nude (but for her pearls) with an anonymous man, performing an act that she remains gloriously unembarrassed about through the trial’s quite bitter end. Delightful and sad, and just three fleet-footed episodes, Scandal is a grown-up pleasure. —T.A.
Those of us who remember how exciting it was to watch The Wire for the first time, hold a special place in our cultural hearts for David Simon and Baltimore, a city where issues of policing, race, the drug war, and politics intersect in unforgettable ways. News of Simon’s latest show, also about policing, also set in Baltimore, written and produced with the legendary crime novelist George Pelecanos, set expectations sky high. In the end, We Own This City almost met them—the six-episode series was a complex and unsparing portrait of police corruption that had the seriousness of longform journalism. If it wasn’t as thrilling as The Wire (what could be?), it was an important reminder of the complexities around police reform, and it had an absolutely lights-out performance by Jon Bernthal as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, an officer who breaks very very bad, but whose charisma and alpha-male confidence never leave him. He’s an electrifying antihero, whose downfall has aspects of tragedy and comeuppance in equal measure. —T.A.
It was the show that spawned a thousand TikTok theories and Reddit threads, a thoroughly modern whodunnit, refracted through the brilliant prism of show creator Mike White. The second season of this resort-set dramedy saw the cast of one-percenters vacationing at a luxurious Sicilian hotel, with stunning cliffs, bright sandy beaches, and the Ionian sea offering a sparkling backdrop. As with the first Hawaiian-set season, all is not well in paradise—discord runs deep among the wealthy couples and other families inhabiting these plush rooms, and it takes an awful lot of effort to keep these guests satisfied, as the harried hotel manager, Valentina (breakout star Sabrina Impacciatore), so delightfully demonstrates. An ensemble enterprise in which there is not a single wrong note, The White Lotus is sumptuous television at its best, without the rough edges that seem a trademark of so much prestige TV. If you haven’t watched it yet, do what you can to evade the commentary; this is a show whose twists and turns are best experienced fresh. —C.S.
The premise might feel vaguely familiar—following a plane crash, a high school girls soccer team in the 1990s tries to survive in the wilderness, quickly descending into Lord of the Flies anarchy—but with its playful mash-up of psychological horror and coming-of-age charm, as well as its clever switches between past and present, Yellowjackets emerged as very much its own beast. In a stroke of meta casting genius, a who’s who of ’90s teen idols plays the teens as adults, including Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, and Melanie Lynskey, all turning in brilliant performances as they grapple with their trauma in their own distinctive ways. The creators of Yellowjackets—a word-of-mouth hit that was made all the better for its weekly drops (and highly active fan theory community on Twitter and Reddit)—have hinted that their vision for the show takes place over a five-season arc. Let’s hope the buzz only continues to build, and we get to see this vicious, twisted delight of a series go all the way to the finish line. —L.H.