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Angie Han: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2022
Angie Han: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2022,The best TV shows of 2022 included 'Better Call Saul,' 'Severance,' 'Rap Sh!t' and 'Reservation Dogs.'

Angie Han: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2022

From left: ‘Better Call Saul,’ ‘This Is Going to Hurt,’ ‘Rap Sh!t,’ ‘Somebody Somewhere’Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television; Courtesy of HBO; Anika Molnar/Sister Pictures/BBC Studios/AMC; Courtesy of HBO Max

The best shows of 2022 didn’t just tell compelling stories or introduce likable characters — they built entire worlds.

Some were clearly fantastical ones, like the sci-fi corporate hell that was Severance. Some transported us to eras or locations rarely depicted in American pop culture, like the Korean generational saga Pachinko. Still others took as their setting a mundane reality and dug deeper to find the specific joys or pains buried within them, à la Somebody Somewhere. A few expanded existing universes, like Better Call Saul has done for Breaking Bad. At least one, The Rehearsal, invented new realities for itself as it went along, only to collapse them all in disorienting, sometimes disturbing fashion.

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Collectively, these series transported us beyond the here and now, and in doing so offered ways to better understand ourselves and the people and communities around us — all while demanding nothing of us but a little bit of imagination and a little bit of empathy.

  1. Better Call Saul (AMC)
    It’s no easy task bringing one of the best dramas on television to a satisfying finish. Better Call Saul pulled it off not by falling back on fan-pleasing tricks (though there was a bit of that as well; hello, Breaking Bad cameos), but by daring to shift into an even more ambitious and unexpected gear with its final Gene-centric chapters — ultimately bringing the tragedy of Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler full circle with one last shared cigarette.

  2. Pachinko (Apple TV+)
    Cutting between Japan-occupied Korea circa the 1930s and Zainichi Koreans in Japan at the tail end of the 1980s, Pachinko’s family saga is at once intimate and epic. Rich production design grounds the plot in a painful colonialist history, while luminous performances turn that history personal and emotional. The past is never really the past, even if the world does keep turning. Pachinko showed how old wounds and loves can reverberate across lifetimes.

  3. Somebody Somewhere (HBO)
    That Somebody Somewhere looks at first like not much, with its mild-mannered vibe and small-town setting, is very much the point. For its semi-depressed heroine, played by Bridget Everett, transcendence lies not in escaping reality, but in welcoming joys that are no less magical for being rather ordinary: the sly smile of a new friend, the warm embrace of a community, the sheer ecstasy of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” on karaoke night.

  4. Reservation Dogs (Hulu)
    From the start, Reservation Dogs has tended to inspire superlatives: It’s one of the funniest shows on television and one of the most heartbreaking, one of the most distinctive and one of the most inventive. And it’s continued earning them with its second season, which digs even deeper into grief and its ability to unite as well as pide — all while still making time for side-splitting jokes about “dinosaur oyate” and detours into a drug trip or a moms’ night out.

  5. Mo (Netflix)
    Boundaries are blurred in Mo, whose title character (played by co-creator Mo Amer) forges his identity from his Palestinian background, his Muslim faith and his Houston upbringing, and his personality from a combination of humor, trauma and innate charisma. The result is a show that allows its characters to connect to each other and their audience on their own terms, appreciating the differences between communities as well as their commonalities.

  6. The Rehearsal (HBO)
    What the hell is The Rehearsal? A bizarre social experiment? A map of one man’s personal anxieties? A prank? An injustice? Is it funny? Is it cruel? What, in the end, does it truly reveal to us about anything at all? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I just know that asking them over and over, while Nathan Fielder’s constructed realities kept folding into one another, made for some of the most jaw-dropping television I’ve seen this year.

  7. This Is Going to Hurt (AMC+)
    This British show deploys a bruised and bruising performance by Ben Whishaw that’s hard to look away from, and then directs that attention with furious purpose. The drama goes beyond merely deglamorizing the medical profession to living in the desperation and devastation that permeate it, and spotlighting the institutional failures that have turned it from a difficult job to a seemingly impossible one.

  8. High School (Amazon Freevee)
    High School adapts musical duo Tegan and Sara’s memoir, but you don’t need to be a fan to appreciate the show for what it does so well. Its observant storytelling captures the anxieties, heartbreaks and ecstasies of growing up queer in 1990s Calgary with a clarity rarely seen since Friday Night Lights or Freaks and Geeks, by way of a clever bifurcated structure that spreads the show’s sense of empathy among a stellar supporting cast.

  9. Severance (Apple TV+)
    With its scrupulously tidy halls and unsettling professional euphemisms, Severance’s Lumon Industries feels simultaneously like no corporate office ever and every corporate office ever. And just as in real office life, its efforts to impose order prove unable to stamp out the messy glory of humanity, as Mark (Adam Scott) and his colleagues find romance, friendship and solidarity (along with a puzzling number of baby goats) in the coldest and most unforgiving of environments.

  10. Rap Sh!t (HBO)
    Thanks to its infectious original songs, vibrant Miami setting and likable performances (led by KaMillion and Aida Osman), Issa Rae’s latest creation was one of the most purely fun shows of the year. What made it also one of the best was its shrewd navigation of the blurred lines between empowerment and exploitation, between performance and self-expression, between social media and real life.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): The Afterparty (Apple TV+), Andor (Disney+), The Bear (Hulu), The Boys (Prime Video), Los Espookys (HBO), Heartstopper (Netflix), Interview with the Vampire (AMC), Our Flag Means Death (HBO Max), Sort Of (HBO Max), Under the Banner of Heaven (Hulu)