Similar to the way that TikTok virality signifies success for musicians these days, seeing a screenshot from a TV series plastered all over social media as the focal point of a new meme pretty much ensures that the show will soon become a hit, if it isn’t already one. With the image disconnected from its source, you don’t necessarily need to know who this extremely tired-looking—and, per thirstier corners of the internet, very attractive—BOH worker is to get the joke, but after seeing that dead-eyed stare enough times, well, you might as well find out what that’s all about.
This isn’t to say that our favorite TV shows of the year were entirely defined by virality, but that constant exposure sure helped embed certain titles into the cultural fabric of 2022. Elsewhere, our favorite series littered the web with an onslaught of screencaps being posted during the massive real-time watch parties taking place the moment these episodes hit their respective streaming platforms, while the more cerebral shows on this list had us so transfixed that it was hard to navigate away from the streaming tab. While they don’t all have an iconic image attached to them, these 10 series have one thing in common: none of them could possibly be reduced to a single still. — Mike LeSuer
10. Only Murders in the Building
The Arconia’s murder podcast–loving tenants are back and better than ever in Hulu's second season of Only Murders in the Building. It’s a delightful ball of laughs and tears watching Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez play off one another. Gomez is even more nuanced in this new season—her character Mabel battled through so much, but she remains a strong and sharp character and a much-needed balance to the zaniness coming from Oliver (Short) and Charles (Martin).
The murder-mystery trio picks up the Arconia antics right where they left off, but with new murderous riddles to solve in their apartment complex. The overall plot this time is even more twisted into knots, but the human drama and high-comedic thrills continue to raise plenty of hairs and spirits. The new episodes see the crew trying to solve the mystery of Bunny Folger's demise while absolving their own names. The murder weapon, victims, and suspects are completely switched up this time around, but the threesome at the center is still just as charming. It’ll be interesting to see how that dynamic shifts for the podcast friends during the third season, with Paul Rudd joining the cast of the witty dramedy series. — Kyle Lemmon
9. The White Lotus
The memes may not have been on the level of House of the Dragon, but the theories absolutely ruled Twitter. Mike White’s anthology series returned from COVID quarantine bigger and better, featuring a sprawling cast, a beautiful location, and an agonizing amount of gender role exploration. Money is a poison, sex is a vice, family is a straightjacket. Tanya’s husband suffocated her imagination; Albie’s father and grandfather fail to role-model anything remotely healthy, leaving him floundering in a sea of expectations. Young women are all schemers of a sort: Portia’s a complainer looking for a way out; Harper’s determined to catch others out; Lucia and Mia play men and women (and pianos) with equal dexterity. Only Daphne is honest with herself, though she lies straight to everyone’s faces.
As in the first series, the death teased at the start is mostly to generate the TV version of clickbait, but when you consider the sheer amount of buzz that preceded the finale, it’s hard to argue with the strategy. If nothing else, this was an actor’s dream showcase, giving us a preview of the young talent sure to dominate our screens for the next five years. — Lizzie Logan
8. Derry Girls
You don’t have to be from Ireland or even have a passing knowledge of the Troubles to relate to playwright Lisa McGee’s wildly compassionate and hilarious series Derry Girls. What makes this show centered around the chaotic situations of a teen friend group so successful is that it highlights average families enduring political (and hormonal) tectonic shifts. This season, McGee brilliantly combined cultural booms of the late-’90s (the gang charmingly embody the Spice Girls and scam their way into a Fatboy Slim concert) with timeless teenage misunderstandings like perceived parental rifts and tragedies such as unexpected death. And, of course, everyone’s favorite nun Sister Michael (Siobhán McSweeney) is there, too. The series finale, which is soundtracked by The Cranberries’ “Dreams” and features a cameo by Liam Neeson, will have you in a puddle of tears—both happy and mournful.
Airing since 2018, Derry Girls has been an undervalued gem of dark comedy about teenage shenanigans for three seasons. McGee has gifted us with not only hysterical situations that only the closest of friends could maneuver, but ways in which the human spirit persists in spite of violent cultural divides. Getting through adolescence is already an unpredictable pain in the ass, but add the impact of societal unrest and adulthood, which already seemed hard to understand, becomes unimaginable. This year’s final season defined Derry Girls as a hat-trick sitcom. — Margaret Farrell
7. Barry
People expected Barry to be a comedy. After all, it’s the passion project of Bill Hader, a very funny person. And with Henry Winkler as an egotistical acting coach? Sounds like a hoot. But since the first season’s harrowing finale, the show has slowly become a tragedy. Maybe it always was. It’s still entertaining, of course, but it tells a story in which actions have consequences, where sins are not forgotten, and no one—no matter how sorry you are, no matter how much you try to change—can escape the inevitable.
The third season is the show’s most emotionally affecting, with our lovable cast of oddballs at their most vulnerable. We see Hank, an eccentric and largely incompetent yet irrefutably endearing criminal, in the embrace of Cristobal; we see the sincerity of their love, and the terrible danger, and we worry that something bad may happen. The bereaved Gene Cousineau still laments his murdered love, and now he knows that Barry, who had become something of a son to him, is responsible for all of his pain. And we see Barry try to make amends, but will Gene, who last season patched things up with his estranged son, ever be able to forgive him? We’ve grown to love Barry, but as with Tony Soprano, we’re forced to reconcile with the evil things he does. Does he deserve his comeuppance? And do we want him to get it? — Greg Cwik
6. Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty
The thrill of Los Angeles Lakers basketball at its first peak—the 1980s of Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, as goes Jeff Pearlman’s book title—started in the disco-lit, pleather-lined, cocaine-sniffed ’70s with the hot-headed one-time player-turned-coach Jerry West (played by Jason Clarke), the playboy doctor-turned-first-time-team-owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), the stoic, spiritualized baller forgetting the joy of the game Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes), and the fresh-out-of-school player who could think of nothing but basketball: Quincy Isaiah’s sly smiling Magic Johnson.
With Adrian Brody, Tracey Letts, and Jason Segel as the coaches that bring the Lakers to the brink, and an ensemble cast to pound the boards, showrunner and pilot-director Adam McKay brings cinema verite energy and smart, sharply humorous scripts to the raw power of victory in this funky, if sometimes controversially fictional, NBA fairy tale. — AD Amorosi
Read our interview with the series’ music supervisor Gabe Hilfer here.
5. The Bear
To see one of the year’s most bravura feats of filmmaking, you need to wait until the penultimate episode of The Bear, which presents explosive, real-time restaurant drama that’s filmed (more or less) in a single continuous take, choreographed so that every broken dish or hurled expletive strikes with maximum emotional and/or comedic precision. It’s incredibly stressful to watch. It’s also a testament to the show’s confidence: Orson Welles employed his long-take tracking shot at the very beginning of Touch of Evil, wielding it almost as a kind of attention-grabbing gimmick. The Bear saves it for long after you’re already hooked.
That confidence emanates from the show’s concrete particulars: a past-its-prime Chicago sandwich shop, fictional but rendered in such lived-in detail that you’ll be tempted to look it up on DoorDash. A perfectly cast crew of restaurateurs whose dialogue is unfussy, punctilious, and darkly funny. A plot that gets into the weeds of trauma, addiction, and the weight of responsibility, all of it crowned by a beautiful portrayal of the dignity of work. Music cues that emanate good taste. And a tone that’s just right, often making you laugh to keep from crying, except for the moments when it just makes you cry. — Josh Hurst
4. The Rehearsal
When asked to write up a blurb about HBO’s docuseries The Rehearsal for this list, I was ready. You see, this wasn’t the first time someone had asked me to put together a writeup on Nathan Fielder’s long-awaiting follow-up to Nathan for You. A few weeks ago, when I was putting together my own top 10 TV shows of 2022, I hired an actor to email me asking if I could handle writing a short blurb on one of the strangest shows on television. In this runthrough, I said yes, and proceeded to write this, a tongue-in-cheek in-joke that only really makes sense if you’ve already seen the series in question, and will therefore understand that I’m being meta while trying also do a service to one of the most perplexing if not ground-breaking series of all time.
I will admit that I wasn’t the most ardent fan of Nathan for You, and so came to The Rehearsal with little in the way of expectation. What I got was something I don’t think I—or anyone else—could ever really be prepared for. Fielder goes so deep down the rabbit hole on The Rehearsal that he comes out the other side turning what at first appears to be a weekly faux-serious docuseries into one of the wildest social experiments ever undertaken. — Sean Fennell
3. Atlanta
At the beginning of the year, we got a whirlwind of information regarding the long-delayed third season of Atlanta: that it had completed filming along with a fourth season, which would both be released by the end of 2022 as the series’ final chapters. But among the 20 episodes that comprise their version of what’s since become known as the “Brockhampton exit,” the series intentionally glosses over the part we TV viewers have become attuned to most anticipate after the intense cliffhanger of 2018’s Season 2—Earn finally adopting the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality to see his client rise to fame—and instead rides this weird thing out by aimlessly wandering the series’ borderline-surreal, revisionist near-future world instead of revisiting any past plotlines.
The results span from one-off episodes that continue to find Paper Boi—now at the top of the rap game with little indication as to how that journey unfolded—slogging through the legitimate-evil open secrets of the music industry, to parenthetical racial morality tales entirely divorced from any of the show’s characters, which each plumb incredible depths of horror, humor, and contemporary social issues. As well represented as the show’s Jarmuschian surgical removal of the precise element of genre filmmaking an audience typically shells out to see is these seasons’ dedication to shoehorning in specific real-life products, media, and A-list white actors with heavy cultural baggage which all manage to increase the realism of the show while carving out new and indelible false images that they’ll forever be associated with in this bizarro alternate timeline that consistently makes us check our Totems. Or Judge Judy’s ass. — Mike LeSuer
2. Abbott Elementary
Has it ever been easier to root for a TV show than it is to root for Abbott Elementary? It’s the little series that could, an underdog that somehow became network television’s undeniable (and final?) four-quadrant hit. It shines the light on the tireless, heroic work of public educators, making the most of limited resources and cumbersome bureaucracies. It’s a workplace comedy about characters who are (mostly) good at what they do and enjoy one another’s company, resisting cynicism in favor of compassion and congeniality. What’s not to love?
Thankfully, this goodwill generator is also an exceptional work of sitcom craft, a fact that is not unrelated to its generous spirit. Episode after episode, the show navigates tensions between old and young, cynics and dreamers, bureaucrats and changemakers, in a way that allows everyone to be right some of the time, an acknowledgement of real-world complexity that scans as radical empathy. But the writing only accounts for some of the show’s rich humor: It’s the first-rate cast who mines a deep reservoir of physical comedy mannerisms, most notably William Tyler James perfecting the Jim Halpert deadpan. And that’s to say nothing of the imperious Janelle James as the titular school’s principal, currently the funniest performance television has to offer. — Josh Hurst
1. Severance
It may not quite be nostalgia by Stranger Things’s all-demographic-consuming definition, but the premise alone of Severance heavily taps into topics explored in widely beloved films released at the turn of the century: the inhumane mediated spaces of The Truman Show, the parallel realities of The Matrix, the corporate hijinx of Office Space—not to mention the extremely Eyes Wide Shut–ness of one particular scene. Then there’s the fact that the show’s main draw is its Eternal Sunshine–like brain surgery, which permits one corporation’s employees the ability to literally and definitively separate their work and home lives, an appealing concept intentionally dangled in front of an audience increasingly unable to separate the two until—as always seems to be the case under capitalism—the company’s evil motives slowly bubble to the surface.
Baked into the odd retrofuturism of the labyrinthine office in which the show is mostly set is an all-too-present critique of the contemporary workplace full of mandatory fun and an ethos of family that never exactly feels genuine. Barely hidden beneath this façade is an air of dehumanization and infantilization that probably shouldn’t feel familiar outside of the series’ science-fictional universe, with the units of labor—programmed not to let their personal lives interfere with their work—constantly being made to feel guilty for their work performance and shamed into submission for hours on end in the dreaded “break room.” I’ve even spoken with young employees of a certain aerospace and defense company who’ve similarly experienced the assignment of ambiguously benign projects which were presented as gamelike which, of course, wound up being something much more sinister.
More than anything, Severance feels like the death knell for the workplace comedy, which seemed to overtake the family sitcom in popularity in the early-2000s with the morose realism of early episodes of The Office practically screaming for workplace reform before that message got swallowed up in its slapstick B-plots and endless copycat series inspired by those lighter tones. Here we are clocking out after a long day of white-collar tedium relocating to a slightly more comfortable sitting area to spend our valuable and increasingly scant time with our outies addicted to programming we find relatable to our work lives. Consider Severance your wake-up call. — Mike LeSuer
