Top 12 of TV in 2022

 My annual list:

You can view my 10 Honorable Mentions here and all the editions of this list dating back to 2009 here. And support me on Patreon here

1. White Lotus (HBO) –The second season of White Lotus brings us characters who run the gamut from naive (Albee); to hypocritically judgmental (Harper); to lonely to the point of selfishness (Tanya); to just-plain shallow (Daphne). And then, of course, Cameron has a shade of all seven deadly sins in one package. However, unlike the first season with irredeemable brats Shane and Olivia, writer-director Mike White managed to navigate their fates and give them enough of a tinge of self-awareness so that they’re all ripe for satire in this grand comedy of manners.
   
   The show is set in Sicily and benefits from the lack of identity politics (they’re all White, no need for grand-standing speeches about White privilege). Ironically, the series is still about identity, but about how we see ourselves in our relationships — largely romantic, but also our subordinates (Tonya-Portia, Valentina-Isabella); and superiors (Jack-Quentin, Albee-Dominic) — and what that says about us. The characters with the highest ideals (Harper, Ethan, Albee) get their asses handed to them by fate, while the two resident prostitutes come out the weeks’ big winners for already having the self-awareness at the beginning of the week that relationships are transactional.

This is the kind of multi-layered character study that sparks endless discussion and the kind of pre-emptive murder mystery that provides endless intrigue.

2. Winning Time (HBO) — This docudrama about the beginning of the Magic Johnson era is apparently completely detached from the historical record. At the same time, maybe it’s better in this age of hyper scrutiny to throw documented history out the window and rely more on the “based on a true story” moniker at the start of each episode? The advantage is that it allows producer Adam McKay to tell the most exciting story his imagination can muster, and it’s pretty damn exciting. Watching this show is a reminder of how little of the narrative in the sports world we get through filtered press conferences and surface-level sports writing: The rivalries, the competitive dynamics, and the struggle to trust one another when the stakes are high.

3. Resident Alien (SyFy)- Alan Tudyk hits the right notes of absurdity as an oblivious alien who improbably manages to integrate into a small town in Colorado. The show is endearingly hokey, rich in character, and features a marshmellowshly portrait of small-town life with plenty of scenery porn in the background. The show also features a sizeable Native American cast and delves into those but doesn’t resort to being pedantic. It’s also harder to find a richer group of scene stealers, whether it’s a true alien believer in Deputy Liz Baker (Elizabeth Bowen) or a former Olympian battling the type of true-to-life depression that comes from being past their prime (Alice Wetterlund). Most importantly, the show is never limited by its science fiction roots. It aims to entertain on a deeper level.

4. Yellowjackets (Showtime) — The series — a cheerful group of high schoolers get decidedly less cheerful and more insane over 18 months as they get stranded in the Canadian wilderness — hasn’t yet gone full “Lord of the Flies.” For now, the first season has laid the groundwork with Lost-like levels of multi-layering and the game of foreshadowing was one of the best interactive experiences on TV this season. On top of that, there’s a lot to be said for the diversity of the characters: The avid outcast Misty (Christina Ricci/Samantha Hanratty), the overly driven Taissa (Tawny Cypress/Jasmin Brown), the guilt-ridden Shauna (Melanie Lynskey/Sophie Nelisse), and the rebellious goth Natalie (Juliette Lewis/Sophie Thatcher) all have polar opposites.

5. Acapulco (Apple Plus): A sort of “How I Met Your Mother” with international flavor and ample doses of scenery porn. Eugene Debenez is Maximo: A tech entrepreneur with his own private island and a bank account with several zeros at the end. He narrates to his nephew how he started his rags to riches story working as a pool boy in one of the most high-caliber resorts of Acapulco. Set towards the dawn of a more globalized North American economy, the 80s time capsule is a love letter to a culture where people have big hearts: Towards their crushes, towards their families, towards their friends, and even towards their enemies (how much homoerotic hugging do we have to endure between Hector and his hazes?).

6. Ghosts (CBS): Eight ghosts from different eras (the 60s hippie movement, the Guided Age, Wall Street excess, the Revolutionary War, etc) inhabit an upstate New York mansion with the ability to talk to just one of the home’s two owners. But as anyone can tell you, it’s the delivery that makes the difference. The eight actors (largely unknowns outside of Rebecca Wiscocky) create comically rich characters with rife potential for great comic dynamics (imagine a Victorian Age snoot interacting with a free-wheeling Prohibition Era jazz singer: You get the idea), and the dialogue never fails to exploit these possibilities. The eight ghosts provide the laughs while the couple at the center (Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar) provide the TGIF-ish heart.

7. The After Party (Apple TV)-Although we like to tell ourselves and our peers that we’re past high school, I suspect the abundance of TV shows about high school with adult audiences is good evidence that we never completely leave those formative years behind. It’s for that part of our identities that “The After Party” hits on the nose so well. Sure, we don’t spend every waking moment thinking about high school by the time we are 15 years out. However, put us in a room with our high school cohorts and I have no doubt that there are always unresolved threads — an unexpressed attraction, a latent inferiority complex, a what-if ticket to stardom, a misbegotten grudge — that is rife for drama fifteen years later. That’s essentially where the show places us. And there’s a murder mystery on top of it, because why not? That the show could function well enough without a murder to solve, bodes well for how solid the show’s comic infrastructure is. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is a pretty solid blend of random comic talent (Ben Schwartz, Tyia Sinclair, Ilana Glazer, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz among others).

8. Central Park (Apple Plus) The third season of this Apple TV show came with the good news that Kristen Bell was returning to a new role as Aunt Abby. Few can deny that Kristen Bell is always a plus and her over-eager aspiring actress didn’t fail to deliver. Not that this show needs any new characters with the hilarious gender-switched due of ultra-rich snoot Bitsy (Stanley Tucci) and her overstressed lackey Helen (Daveed Diggs) providing such great laughs. In the interim, the interracial Tillerman family — Owen (Leslie Odom Jr.), Paige (Kathryn Hahn), Cole (Titus Burgess), and (Molly) Emma Raver Lampman — provides the heart. Just watch the Mother’s Day episode and try not to tear up.

9. Welcome to Flatch (Fox): It’s a key ingredient in small-town comedies that you have to add a healthy dose of quirk but few shows have been able to find the comic sweet spot in those peculiarities as well as this show. The show uses a mockumentary style that might evoke comparisons to Parks and Recreation but the characters are much less universally relatable. The show’s protagonists are a pair of aimless cousins (likely around age 20) who are the product of a lack of parental supervision, a little bit of suppressed cabin fever, and hyper-active imaginations. Joining them is lovelorn small-town newspaper owner Cheryl Petersen (Aya Cash) who came to Flatch from the big city as the significant other to the town pastor (Seann William Scott) but got dumped immediately thereafter. Cheryl, forever upbeat but often frightened at the change to small-town life, is an apt audience surrogate (and on a side note, my hero as a small-town journalism admirer). There’s also an uptight town historian, a perverted blind man, and a love interest for Shrub (one of the cousins) who is emotionally catatonic. Very few character beats are wasted on this show.

10. Killing It (Peacock) — Two broke Floridians, Craig (Craig Robinson) and Jillian (Claudia O’Doherty), team up in a contest to kill an invasive species of snakes. As the season goes on, the plot places its two protagonists within a web of the type of opportunist Floridian characters that originally showed up in Elmore Leonard or Dave Barry novels and have now become meme-worthy. At its best, the series is a modern-day Glengarry Glen Ross for how the gig economy is all too often a never-ending spiral of doom.

11. Ramy (Hulu): The show bungled the ending of last season and its central character badly enough that it’s hard to know where Ramy Yousef could take things next. As Dianne Nguyen suggests to BoJack Horseman whose arc ends in tragedy “or you can just go on living.” Like Robert Altman taught us with his notorious abrupt movie endings, life doesn’t have neatly compartmentalized movie endings; let alone unhappy ones. That’s 2022 Ramy in a nutshell: Still trying to seek enlightenment but fully aware that he’s now a few steps more removed from societal acceptance. While Ramy navigates his new purgatory, the show continues to deliver moments of brilliance with tangents to its side characters. Like some of the middle-of-the-series temporary breakthroughs of BoJack, the season ends with Ramy doing something that’s foolishly stupid and truly honorable.

12. As We See It (Amazon)-The story takes place in the Bay area with three autistic people with wildly different wants of life and situations sharing a house under one roof with the guidance of their ridiculously awesome life coach Mandy. Half the appeal is watching Sosie Bacon be understanding, committed, and loving in ways that I’m not even capable of in the presence of other autistic people, and I’m on the upper end of the spectrum myself. The story progresses well and trisects with the three central autistic characters diverging towards different paths, of which the other two are only marginally aware of at any given time. I do have to give a knock that the romance between the neurotypical person and the disadvantaged guy, which would likely not have been anywhere near as easy in real life.

Ten Honorable Mentions:
Adventure Beast (Netflix) S1, Cobra Kai (Netflix) S4–5, Derry Girls (Netflix) S4, Dicktown (FX) S2, Dropout (Hulu) Miniseries, Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon), Resort (Peacock) S1, Reboot (Hulu) S1, Shantaram (Apple Plus) S1, True Story with Ed and Randall (Peacock) S1

And for reference, everything else I watched this year (write-ups for most of these can be found on my profile):
Abbott Elementary (ABC), Alaska Daily (ABC), Blockbuster (Netflix), The Bear (Hulu) (3 ep), Bumper in Berlin (Peacock), Cat Burglar (Netflix), Disenchanted (Netflix), Dollface (Hulu), God’s Favorite Idiot (Netflix), Hard Cell (BBC →Netflix), House Broken (Hulu), Home Economics (ABC), Human Resources (Netflix) (2 ep), Inside Job (Netflix), Inventing Anna (Netflix) (3 ep), Loot (Apple Plus), Minx (HBO) (1 ep, would have watched more), Mr Mayor (NBC), Mosquito Coast (Apple Plus), My Unorthodox Life (Netflix), Never Have I Ever (Netflix) (2 eps), Orville (Hulu), Our Flag Means Death (HBO), Outlaws (Apple Plus), Pentuverate (Hulu), Quantum Leap (Peacock) (2–3 ep), Righteous Gemstones (HBO), Rutherford Falls (Peacock), Severance (Apple Plus), Shining Faces (Apple Plus) (2 ep), Single Drunk Female (Freeform) (3–4 eps), Solar Opposites (Hulu), Space Force (Netflix), Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount), Strung (Freeve), Tommy and Pam (Hulu) (2–3 ep), United States of Al (CBS), Upload (Amazon), We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime), What We do in the Shadows (FX), Welcome to Wexhingham (Hulu)

Top Ten TV Villains of 2022

 As a staff writer at TV Fanatic, I contributed to the list of 2022’s Villains We Love To Hate — TV Fanatic. Check out that list!

My entries were:

Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), Dropout, Hulu-In this docudrama of the Stanford-educated fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, Sunny is the idle millionaire who initially forms a friendship with Elizabeth as an 18-year-old studying abroad in China. As the relationship veers from age-inappropriate to worthy of many more red lights, Sunny starts to gradually take control of Elizabeth’s better instincts as a CEO. Docudramas are at their best when they frame true stories in novel ways. In this version, Elizabeth Holmes (who, yes, is still responsible for her crimes) as a proverbial Othello to Sunny’s Iago figure. Like all the best villains, there’s a dash of sympathy to the character at the start — he’s lonely; he’s sold his life invention so his best years are behind him — before his crimes start to catch up with him.

Adult Misty (Christina Ricci) Yellowjackets, Showtime-Full disclosure: The show’s inaugural season hasn’t revealed enough to determine whether Misty is the big villain in the present-day. But that’s ok: Misty has done enough bad deeds in the show’s B-plots to qualify her. And holy cow, is she pretty ingenious when it comes to evil doing. In a show as dark as Yellowjackets, Misty is a playful enough personality to balance out the resigned trauma of Shauna or the unsolved anger of Natalie. Without Misty’s presence, it would be a completely different show.

Frederick Gideon (Kevin Durand), Locke and Key, Netflix-I’m having trouble believing, I put this on my Honorable Mentions list last year, because there is a lot of ham and the actors play the level of danger pretty broadly. Kevin Durand, however, must not have gotten the memo when he signed up for the part of back-from-the-dead Revolutionary War general (from the other side) Frederick Gideon. This dude is appropriately dastardly for a man who already hated his American counterparts pre-resurrection; is currently possessed by demons; and has access to modern technology. His presence also comes with small doses of fish-out-of-water humor as he learns about cars and the rules of libraries for the first time.

Lupe (Regina Orozco), Acapulco, Apple Plus: If you’re working at the lavish Las Colinas resort and want a boss who will go easy on you, then you don’t want Lupe. And don’t even think about trying to date her niece! From her tyrannical hold on the lost and found to her low tolerance for fun on the job, Lupe isn’t easy for the laundromat workers under her domain, but she’s a riot for the viewers at home. But she’s full of surprises: She delivers a show-stopping number during the Christmas episode.

Some other entries I would add:
General Eleanor Wright (Linda Hamilton), Resident Alien, Syfy-General Wright is pretty easygoing with torture and various other forms of cruelty in order to meet her goals. On the other hand, she’s pretty consistent the way a diligent civil servant is. So you at least know what you’re getting with her.

Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), Dropout, Hulu-Sure Sunny steals a lot of scenes, but this is Elizabeth’s show. As I said above, a docudrama is about framing a story a certain way. In this eminently watchable version, Holmes is initially portrayed as someone caught in a white lie. “So what if our tech isn’t 100% yet? We’ll figure it out sooner or later,” she assumes. Is it a bad gamble or a malicious act? That’s for the audience to figure out.

Anna Delvy (Julie Garner), Inventing Anna, Netflix-Along with The Dropout, Inventing Anna was another docudrama about a woman with a complex relationship with the truth. But this show wasn’t so much about psychoanalyzing the latest headline-making criminal. Rather, Anna was just a batty meme (exhibit A: Chloe Finneman’s delicious SNL parody) and the story was more about her sly journalist counterpart (Anna Chlumsky) was going to get the story out of her. Though not a dynamic character, Delvy was a pretty entertaining villain. Also, a pretty zeitgeisty one in an era when certain politicians have turned personal narrative into something so plastic.

Quentin (Tom Hollander), White Lotus, HBO-He’s got panache. He’s got refinement. And it’s so nice that he’s just openly gay in contrast to the villains who encoded with effeminate tendencies during the more censored eras of Hollywood. But here’s why I really love him: He’s dumb as a rock as an assassin abettor, and that’s plenty entertaining. Think about it. If not for the fact that Greg entrusted him with such a fool-proof plan and Portia wasn’t so dense, his endless monologuing and extremely direct targeting of Portia would have caught most people off guard pretty instantly.

John Kreese (Martin Kove), Cobra Kai, Netflix-I mean, duh. This guy falls more toward the bottom of the list because he’s quite cartoonish in his motivations. I’m sure there’s a good drinking game to be had for how many times he launches into each of his awful monologues (i.e. “everything I did was to make you stronger blah blah blah”). But on the upside, he actually is pretty scary. Our capacity to care whether the good guys won was significantly lower in Season 6 when Kreese was in prison, so that’s a good indication. It didn’t help that one of the faux sophisticated Terry Silver’s methods of terror was trying to sow seeds of discord by (not making this up) inviting the LaRussos to a fund-raiser and then making Danny look stupid by being nicer to his wife than to him.

Satan (Leslie Bibb), God’s Favorite Idiot, Netflix-In this office comedy set at the potential dawn of the apocalypse, Leslie Bibb plays a Satan with a sexy Halloween costume kind of vibe. Comparable to Elizabeth Hurley in the 2000 Rom-Com flick The Bedazzled, Bibb is practically breaking the fourth wall to telegraph to the audience how much fun she’s having here.

Best TV Ensembles of 2022

 I contributed a couple entries to this TV Fanatic crowd-sourced article about best ensembles on TV.

My top pick: Reboot (Hulu)

Reboot is about the coexistence of different generations of artists. In that vein, who could be better epitomize that clash than Paul Reiser and Rachel Bloom as an estranged father and daughter entrusted with co-running a sitcom?

Reiser is an old-school 90s sitcom star with a comic delivery that borrows a little from Borscht Belt comedy. Rachel Bloom made her way to TV fame as the star and co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend via YouTube stardom that turned musical theater conventions on their head.

The pair is complemented by a writing room that echoes Bloom’s Gen Z approach to artistic merit with Riser’s Borscht Belt big laughs approach, and the combination is hilarious.

Meanwhile on the show’s set, Keegan-Michael Key, Judy Greer, Johnny Knoxville (who thought of that casting choice?), and Calum Worthy play a quartet of has-been actors who form a found family with healthy doses of comedy and heart.

Other picks:
Ghosts (CBS): The eight actors who play the ghosts weren’t particularly hot on casting lists before this show. In an ideal world, they should be now. Each member of the octet provides such pitch-perfect character beats to create this great whirlwind of humor. It’s like your favorite comedic duo expanded by six with the rat-a-tat banter still operating like clockwork. Of course, credit goes to Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) for bringing the heart and grounding the plots. (I also wrote about Ghosts here)

Star Trek Picard (Paramount Plus): Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, and Santiago Cabrera bring a sense of visceral edge that I’ve never seen in Star Trek before. Pill’s displays an antsy-ness at being in space that seems pretty logical for most humans, but somehow Star Trek has never shown that side of the 24th century populance before. It makes sense: Star Trek: The Next Generation was designed to appeal to a broad audience in the 1980s so the actors weren’t aiming for high drama, but when the TNG cast is introduced they also are up to that higher bar.

Yellowjackets (Showtime): The show centers around a plane crash involving a teenage soccer in the 90s, and the way the survivors are traumatized all the way through their adulthoods. How fitting that the show cast three of the most promising ingenues of the 90s as the roles of the four main survivors: Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis. All three have long been underrated actresses and deserve to be attached to one of the hit shows on television. But that’s half the battle: The show also succeeds in casting matching teenage versions of these characters with all their drama.

Winning Time (HBO)-When you have two Oscar winners in your cast (Adrien Brody and Sally Field) and neither of them are central characters, then you’ve got a pretty deep talent pool. This docudrama about the Lakers 1980 championship features John C. Reilly in one of the most complex roles of his storied career as larger-than-life team owner Jerry Buss. Quincy Isaiah shines here in his first screen credit playing Magic Johnson as a bright-eyed superstar that’s still in the incubation phase. His main rival for the starting position is Norm Nixon played with swagger by the real-life figure’s son, DeVaughn. Surrounding them are a murderer’s row of character actors in Jerry West, Hadley Robinson, Jason Segel (did not see that coming), Tracey Letts, and the aforementioned Brody alongside Field who makes a strong impression with little screen time.

Ramy (Hulu): Ramy Yousef just plays a less self-assured version of himself, but there’s so much idiosyncrasy in the characters around him that this show deserves a place. Watching this show and not knowing the names of all the actors is a good reminder of the scarcity of Middle-Eastern actors with name recognition. Ramy’s parents are played by Amr Waked (Syriana, Salmon Fishing in Yemen) and Hiam Abbass (The Visitor) who have both done enough good work to be names among more astute American audiences, but everyone on this show deserves a brighter future. It also helps that the show format gives characters like Dena (May Calamaway), Uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli), and Ahmed (Dave Marheje) an episode in the spotlight or two.

The White Lotus (HBO)-This one is going to pop up on a lot of my lists because you can't make a TV series that works on so many layers without doing so many things right. This show has Lost/Arrested Development levels of Easter Egg placement and you better believe that the actors are in on the intricacies of each character. The show's brightest star is Emmy-winner Jennifer Coolidge but deserves a lot of credit for finding a new tone of deadpan for Aubrey Plaza, and making spaces for the largely unknown-to-American-audiences Italian newbies.