The 20 Best TV Shows of 2022

Other series on this list featured spaceships, explosions, serial killers, time travel, and other spectacle. The whole point ofthis small-town dramedy was how little happens in the lives of its characters, particularly Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller as a pair of former high school classmates who reconnect after she returns home from a disappointing life elsewhere. The pleasures ofSomebody Somewherecame not from exciting incident, but how deeply felt each small moment was, and how much inner life Everett and Hiller — both better known for comedy — and their co-stars were able to portray. A little gem.

It is impossible to imagine a show like Sort Of — co-created by and starring Bilal Baig as Sabi, a gender-fluid Pakistani-Canadian struggling to find a place where they fully belong — existing 10 years ago, or even five. It features characters with a wide variety of gender identities and sexual identities, yet it never feels the need to pause to explain or define any of them for a straight/cis audience — a benefit of coming after shows like Transparent, Orange Is the New Black, and even Billions, which had to hold viewers’ hands. Instead, it is allowed to simply tell the story of Sabi and their friends and family, and to blend amusing hijinks with poignant emotion, with more confidence and determination than Sabi usually feels.

TV does not lack for hospital dramas, with Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Doctor, Chicago Med, and others chugging along season after season. But it’s been a while since we’ve had one debut that’s as raw and engrossing as This Is Going to Hurt, starring Ben Whishaw as an OB/GYN struggling with burnout and the overwhelming, fragile nature of the UK’s National Health Service. Whishaw deftly conveys the psychological toll of working in such a system, even as he doesn’t shy away from the fact that the arrogant character he’s playing may be just as much of a danger to his patients as all the bureaucracy. 

The concept of this FX-developed miniseries — a serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson) imprisons his therapist (Steve Carell) in his basement in a desperate attempt to cure his homicidal urges — is so heightened that there was almost no way it wouldn’t seem silly or over-the-top. Yet creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg manage to take their premise completely seriously, using it to force their psychologist hero to confront less elaborate traumas in his own life, and letting Carell and Gleeson play things straight. And as they did on The Americans, Fields and Weisberg figure out the exact right way to bring this potentially ridiculous story to the appropriate ending. 

There is dream logic, and then there is whatever inexplicable logic supports the universe of Los Espookys, about a group of friends in an unnamed Latin American country who help solve people’s problems using horror movie tropes. Andrés (co-creator Julio Torres) regularly converses with the moon, whom we see as a lonely woman who just wants to flirt with a cute comet. Tati (co-creator Ana Fabrega) decides to become an author just by rewriting classic literary works in her own odd voice, and she soon becomes a bestseller. Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco) is haunted by a beauty queen with an anchor through her chest, and spends an episode playing an adorable, fuzzy pink monster named Bibi’s in order to scare a group of schoolchildren into obeying their teacher. None of it should make any sense. Somehow, all of it does, and the comedy’s second season felt even funnier and more self-assured than the first. Perhaps we didn’t deserve a show this delightfully, hilariously specific; HBO recently announced that there would not be a third season.

It was a busy year for Ramy Youssef. In addition to writing, directing, and starring in a third season of his self-titled Hulu dramedy, he also co-created the excellent Netflix series Mo, which could just as easily have been on this list. (Hey Netflix, order a second season already!) Season Three found the fictional Ramy making bank as a diamond dealer, even as his parents and sister were struggling both monetarily and spiritually. But a financially flush Ramy is still a narcissistic, obliviously harmful Ramy. The new episodes smartly used everyone’s changed circumstances to find different ways to explore the series’ questions about faith, morality, assimilation, and less high-minded pursuits. (One episode spends a lot of time talking about the feasibility of a poop transplant, after all.) A great show, albeit one that can sometimes be difficult to sit through when Ramy and the others are behaving badly.

At various points in the final season of this family dramedy, other characters would praise Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) for the life she has built for herself as a single mother, daughter, friend, and actor (in that order). Because the audience knows that Sam’s life is so closely inspired by Adlon’s, it would be very easy for all of this to play as if the show’s creator/writer/director/star were patting herself on the back about her own awesomeness. But Adlon has told Sam’s story with such artistry, and with such frequent self-laceration, that these moments play less as boasting than as the show finally cutting Sam a break after all these years of struggling. One of the best shows of the last decade went out on its own thoroughly lovely terms.

Everything old is new again in broadcast network comedy, where 2022 saw a bevvy of promising new series drawing inspiration from some of the best sitcoms of the 2010s. By far the best of these has been Abbott Elementary, which transplants The Office/Parks and Recreation formula into a resource-starved Philadelphia school. Abbott surrounds creator/star Quinta Brunson’s pathologically optimistic young teacher Janine with a host of killer supporting performances, including Emmy winner Sheryl Lee Ralph as an aristocratic veteran, Lisa Ann Walter as a shady second grade teacher, Janelle James as a principal who cares more about her side hustles, Chris Perfetti as a cripplingly woke idealist, and Tyler James Williams as a new teacher who can’t stop shooting Jim Halpert-esque looks of disbelief at the mockumentary cameras. It arrived fully formed and has only gotten funnier in its second season. 

The first season of Russian Doll, which trapped Natasha Lyonne’s hyper-verbal Nadia in a Groundhog Day-style time loop, was one of the more perfect debut seasons in recent memory, setting an impossibly high bar for a second season. And, indeed, the follow-up story, which saw Nadia and Alan (Charlie Barnett) Quantum Leaping into their mothers and grandmothers, felt a lot messier. Yet the emotions somehow felt even richer and more complex, and the new episodes ultimately proved that Russian Doll could work as more than just a one-shot. More, please. 

Where the next show on our list succeeded by taking an old sci-fi franchise in a new direction, Strange New Worlds was a triumph of returning to what had worked. After previous modern spinoffs like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard got bogged down in uninteresting season-long arcs, Strange New Worlds remembered that the franchise tends to work best with a Mission of the Week approach. It was fun to again see a starship traveling from planet to planet, and to see it crewed by such an appealing cast of characters, first and foremost led by Anson Mount’s impossibly charming and empathetic Captain Pike. Sometimes, the boldest move is to go where many shows have gone before. 

The highs of this Rogue One prequel series were incredibly high, offering visceral, tactile drama that felt truly adult in a way Star Wars rarely has, with great performances by Stellan Skarsgård (as ruthless spymaster Luthen), Genevieve O’Reilly (as anxious future Rebellion leader Mon Mothma), Andy Serkis (as jaded prison trustee Kino), Kyle Soller (as Andor-obsessed security guard Syril), and more. But the show also meandered around for the first chunk of the season, and never found a way to make the emotional journey of its title character (Diego Luna) nearly as interesting as that of everyone around him. When it was rolling, though, Andor went to creative places it didn’t seem possible for a Star Wars series to visit.

This adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s historical-fiction novel balances epic sweep with intimate characterization, focusing on one family’s struggle during Japan’s occupation of Korea, and the impact it had on future generations. A knockout on technical levels (few shows this year looked or sounded better) and in terms of performances (with Yu-na Jeon, Minha Kim, and Youn Yuh-jung seamlessly playing the same heroine across many decades), it also boasts the best opening credit sequence TV’s had in quite some time, with the whole ensemble dancing through a Pachinko parlor. 

Somehow, the vampire mockumentary just keeps getting funnier. Season Four found Laszlo (Matt Berry) becoming a father figure to the reborn Baby Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), Nadia (Natasia Demetriou) opening a vampire nightclub, Nandor (Kayvan Novak) making many poor wishes after rubbing a djinn’s lamp, and human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) struggling to define a life for himself away from his master Nandor. Oh, and there was a whole installment presented as an episode of Laszlo’s favorite house-flipping reality show. Still filthy, still ludicrous, still the most reliable laugh machine you can find.