Looking back: the best TV shows of 2022 – The White Lotus, Stranger Things and Pachinko provide an epic year in TV
From the anxiety-inducing culinary drama The Bear starring Jeremy Allen White to the Korean family saga Pachinko with Youn Yuh-jung, here are the best TV shows of 2022
10. The Bear, Disney+
Is there a workplace more anxiety-inducing than a kitchen? Christopher Storer's fraught and aggressive culinary drama The Bear revels in the adrenaline pulsing through a Chicago sandwich shop, worsened by the worries baked into running a small business that's swirling into bankruptcy.
Leaving behind a career in a high-end restaurant, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) runs his brother's shop after the latter suddenly dies. Dealing with his defensive cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), he attempts to implement Michelin star rules with mixed feelings and results from the staff. Aside from a few breaths here and there, the chefs work furiously to meet his standards. But with Carmy’s trauma, barely dealt with, his head is raring to explode like a frying-pan fire.
Photo: Disney
9. The Rehearsal, Sky Comedy
For those with social anxiety, The Rehearsal is something of a revelation – albeit a peculiar one. Awkward comedian Nathan Fielder rehearses every upcoming situation in his head, so that he’s able to prepare meticulously for most scenarios should they end up happening. In this new series, he takes forward-thinking to an obsessive level and, as a result, crafts the weirdest reality show of the year.
Fielder meets people with plans that they’re afraid to experience. With an HBO budget, he tries to create the exact circumstances of the future situation – going as far as building sets, hiring actors, and using facial-ageing technology. And as you plunge further into the series, you go further into him. Preparing for the possibility of fatherhood, Fielder uses child actors of varying ages to play his kids. It's a gripping, uneasy watch.
Photo: Sky
8. Better Call Saul, season 6, Netflix
Usually, ‘slow TV’ refers to those lighthearted documentaries that involve fishing or canals or walks or train journeys. It’s incomparable to ‘slow cinema’, an arthouse approach that stretches out time for aesthetic and dramatic purposes. Better Call Saul is the best argument for a rebrand of slow TV to resemble the latter and better-respected definition.
This Breaking Bad spin-off follows the rise and fall and escape of criminal lawyer Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill/Gene Takovic (Bob Odenkirk) over six seasons. Episodes are ponderous, reserved and enjoy taking their time to understand the character as well as the dangerous forces operating around him.
The risk here is not losing intrigue, it’s sticking the landing. And the series achieves it beautifully: Saul struggles between his various personas and finally submits to himself in a breathtaking monologue that marks the likely zenith of Odenkirk’s career. A masterclass in writing and directing, Vince Gilligan's criminal underworld will be missed.
Photo: Netflix
7. My Brilliant Friend: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Sky Atlantic
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet rippled across modern literature, and its Italian TV adaptation deserves a similar amount of praise. In the third season, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, second-wave feminism and female sexual liberation rise among the population. Our academic heroine Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) experiences them while living through the country’s infamous ‘Years of Lead’ – a long, political fracas between fascists and communists starting in the late 60s.
Elena’s published her first novel, scandalising the conservative town in which she grew up. But aside from jobs at a local newspaper, her duties turn domestic after tying the knot with fellow student Pietro (Matteo Cecchi). As well as examining the explosive politics of the time, season three shows the hardships of being a woman in the years of supposed revolution. This season is about Elena’s liberation, observing and learning from her brilliant friend Lila (Gaia Girace) – a beautiful mind, burdened by the deterministic realities of her class, family and gender.
It’s sad to bid farewell to Mazzucco and Girace, their bright and hazardous chemistry so vital to the series. But a more terrible goodbye is coming with the next season of My Brilliant Friend being the last.
Read our review of season three, episode one.
Photo: Sky
6. Stranger Things 4, Netflix
It’s the series that saw Kate Bush rise to the top of the charts (again). Although Running Up That Hill is always a banging tune, its use in Stranger Things 4 created history-defining television. Bush’s rhythms pull the grief-stricken Max (Sadie Sink) from the clutches of the villainous Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) and the hellish Upside Down, returning her to her friends.
Fantasies work best when they're tangled with real emotions, creating an overwhelming, impossible experience. Vecna feeds off the darkness in humans, reducing them to crumbling souls that suffer a limb-twisting death. This terrifying monster makes the fourth volume in this horror/sci-fi Netflix adventure the most psychological and frightening.
Also, sibling creators The Duffer Brothers broaden their already-massive ambitions beyond the Stephen King-like town of Hawkins, Indiana. They travel to California, Alaska and Siberia – scattering numerous loveable characters around the world. Has any other series in the genre achieved such feats? Sure, the two-and-a-half-hour finale is excessive, but there’s never a tedious or superfluous moment: your emotional investment is gripped by Vecna’s claw. He still hasn’t let go.
Photo: Netflix
5. Severance, Apple TV+
Gradually, Apple TV+ is becoming the superior streaming platform. Not because of its popularity, but its quality – providing a good home for stranger outliers. Severance is one of them. Combining the bureaucratic surrealism of Franz Kafka with the nightmarish totalitarianism of George Orwell, this strange dystopian drama from Dan Erikson imagines an organised future where the personal and professional are separated literally.
Office workers in the Macrodata Refinement department at Lumon Industries have signed up for a specific package. Once they enter the lift to their office, they forget everything about their lives outside. None of them will be concerned or distracted by any personal issues. Once they return to the lift, they resume their home lives and forget what happened at work. The series follows the rule-abiding manager Mark (Adam Scott), who begins to sense something iffy – not only about severance but the corporation as a whole.
Photo: Apple
4. The White Lotus, season 2, Sky Atlantic
In these modern streaming days, it’s pleasing to have every episode of a series all at once. But there’s still something inescapably special about having to wait, week after week, for another instalment. The White Lotus embodied that pleasure. The online speculation around this lavish ensemble drama reached stupendous proportions for its second season – superseding the first in both quality and meme-able content.
Season two begins with another body, its identity shrouded in mystery. This is less of a priority and more of a starting pistol, with the drama focusing instead on the hotel's over-privileged, multi-layered guests and the fascinating staff that attend to them.
Writer/creator Mike White creates an Altmanesque atmosphere, dropping into various groups like confluent waves mixing into each other. The sexual tension raises the Sicilian temperatures, evolving into the horniest show of the year. By the end, the series reaches boiling point when rage, jealousy, and repression finally erupt.
Photo: Sky
3. Euphoria, season 2, Sky Atlantic
Despite a decent reception for the first season, the second round of Euphoria became a divisive talking point. Largely due to behind-the-scenes controversies, involving the writer/creator/director Sam Levinson. But although some of these criticisms are valid, this vivacious teen drama still succeeds as the darkest, most wired and most shocking show on TV – capturing the bleaker corners of Gen-Z and the apocalyptic world they're inheriting.
That world is postered with unforgettable images. A woman entering a strip club and shooting its manager, whose erection stands proud from his trousers. The closeted, patriarchal father Cal Jacobs (Eric Dane) urinating in the hallway of his family home. The teenage drug-addict Rue (Zendaya) running through a motorway like she's in a Safdie brothers movie. A personal highlight: the creative introvert Lexi (Maude Apatow) putting on a school play that dismantles her friends and family, with her sister Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) seething from afar.
Yes, Euphoria is exceedingly over-the-top, but that’s part of its anxious charm. And the series offers such an excruciating and sympathetic account of addiction as well as the hurt, loss and rejection that spirals from it.
2. This Is Going to Hurt, BBC One
Watching This Is Going to Hurt will make you appreciate the NHS and the courageous people giving their lives for it. At the same time, the seven-part BBC series – penned by former doctor Adam Kay – shows you the crumbling foundations from the inside.
The lack of money and resources puts the not-so-heroic central doctor Adam (perfectly played by Ben Whishaw) into a state of consistent chaos, the first episode like an inferno of medical issues smothered in blood and pain. He's also observing the young trainee doctor Shruti (Ambika Mod), who's pushed into the deep end of obs and gynae.
The mental strains strangle them in separate ways, yet neither can bring themselves to explain the torture of working in the wards. How could anyone outside the NHS possibly comprehend the kind of pressures they're under? Adam turns to us, the audience, in a Fleabag-ish way, to let loose without scrutiny. And although the nature of the job makes mistakes inevitable, forgiveness is difficult to find. Adam suffers trauma from one such mistake, which leads to a legal hearing. This Is Going to Hurt is a brutal, unflinching look inside one of the nation’s most beloved institutions.
Photo: BBC
1. Pachinko, Apple TV+
Alongside cinema, television has evolved beyond the inconvenience of subtitles (what Bong Joon Ho called the 'one inch tall barrier'). This newer acceptance materialises decent production values for worldly stories like Pachinko, the best show of 2022.
The writer/creator Soo Hugh (The Terror) seems to make every effort to further complicate the eight-part drama. She converts Min Jin Lee's chronological novel into a non-linear stream, crashing between Korea, Japan and the US during three crucial time periods in the 20th century – poring over generations of characters, whose collective memory is fading with age and death. Pachinko is an international family saga with which the medium of television loves to dance, much like its unforgettable title sequence.
The chief character Sunja is played by three actors in three major stages of her life, including Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung as a grandmother in the 1980s. Her grandson Solomon (Jin Ha) is pressured by his American investment bank to meet their capitalistic standards, but years of generational trauma experienced by Sunja – formerly oppressed by the historic Japanese regime – start to affect those monetary concerns.
Each episode is shot with scenic and sympathetic grace, the last episode an explosion of tearful humanism – bolstered by real interviews with older Koreans who lived in the times depicted. Pachinko is a poetic and poignant masterpiece of modern television.
Photo: Apple