From sex to death and drama to comedy: the best of television and streaming in 2022
2022 was a year of amazing television. Here are the very best offerings — all ready to binge — of the small screen.
It was a year when the new shows never stopped coming, at an almost alarming rate for any critic, often without promotion or publicity, even as much-loved dramas finally came to an end. There was considerable industrial chaos as the streamers grappled with the dilemma of how to cut their running costs without losing the kind of shows that appealed to their subscription base.
But one thing – never has TV been such a conduit to broader social issues in terms of gender and race or for outlining wider political perspectives.
And there has never been so much TV – one survey suggested this year that Americans devoured almost 15 million years’ worth of streaming content in the previous 12 months. I feel I have almost watched that much too, though much of it I can only recall with aid of deep sleep therapy.
But many shows stood out this year. With Mike White’s The White Lotus’s second season creating the most noise, the series quickly became one of the highest streamed shows of 2022, harvesting critical acclaim and social media attention. It was at times lacerating, satirical but also really moving and the whodunit convention totally annoying – we all just had to know who was going to die.
The Bear, too, grabbed attention. Starring the brilliant Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, an award-winning chef who moves back to his Chicago hometown to run his late brother’s sandwich shop, it was one of the hits of the year. Frantic, intense, wonderfully profane and at times emotionally raucous, Carmy dragged us immersively into the world of the professional kitchen.
And locally, Bunya production’s outback series, Mystery Road: Origin, was also a standout, the third instalment in a wonderful franchise, directed with cinematic skill and panache by Dylan Rivers, taking the story back to what its creators called its “brew of tropic gothic outback noir.” Executive producers Ivan Sen and Blake Ayshford handed the creative baton to a new generation of Indigenous filmmakers to guide a large ensemble cast in a dry and forbidding landscape. It made a star out of Mark Coles Smith as the young city cop returning to his outback home, a younger version of the stoic older man played memorably by Aaron Pederson.
There were many surprises, often just popping up in schedules with little fanfare. Muster Dogs from the ABC was simply delightful TV, as well as being thoughtful, engaged and cast with a bunch of wonderful characters from the land, their laid-back humour coloured with a hard, sceptical and sombre undertone. They are the five farming families who take on the challenge of training new kelpie pups and testing their worth on the properties they run.
Foreign language shows continued to proliferate, starting early with the brilliant French drama The Promise (La Promesse), an intense narrative about a missing child, joining Lupin, The Bureau, Spiral and Call My Agent in being acclaimed internationally for its cinematic flair and narrative originality.
Reacher was a surprise hit early in the year for Amazon Prime. Jack Reacher is novelist Lee Child’s hero of epic proportions, the ex-MP drifter with the seldom-talked-about past, who has an almost psychotic obsession with being his own man. He’s played with skill by the huge Alan Ritchson, the series an improvement on the two Reacher movies starring the diminutive Tom Cruise, hardly Child’s gargantuan creation, who is often described in the books as having hands the size of turkeys or dinner plates.
Paramount Plus’s Joe Pickett, another surprise hit, was adapted from the novels of the great C. J. Box, all international bestsellers, millions sold, and now translated in around 30 languages. The series introduced to TV the knockabout ranger, known as “the game warden who does no wrong”, a lone wolf law enforcement officer dedicated to the Wyoming wilderness in which he operates. As a character Pickett explores the value conflicts between the traditional ways of wilderness life, the inevitability of progress and the legal process, the show full of twists, conspiracies, moral lapses, and moments of cruel violence and gross impulsivity.
Subversive creator Adam McKay, of Succession fame, gave us the madcap, full volume, highly stylised Winning Time, his account of the creation of the Magic Johnson-led Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s. This saw the charismatic Johnson win five championships with the franchise, alongside the sullen Kareem Abdul Jabaar and his trademark ambidextrous “skyhook” shot. And of course it all takes place against the backdrop of seismic cultural and economic changes in America. It was fantastic really, like jazz pictorially, a wonderful American culture mix tape, a collage of America at that time.
Thoroughly enjoyable too was the British version of the Netflix French hit Call My Agent, renamed as Ten Percent, the witty show about London showbiz managers whose lives are lived in a kind of cinephilic haze, deeply in love with movies and for whom work is their vocation.
Julia too was a hoot, the eight-part drama based on the life of famous celebrity American chef Julia Child, played so convincingly by Sally Lancashire, and her successful, long-running cooking show, The French Chef, which debuted in 1963. It was one of this year’s delights, beguiling, intelligent, witty, beautifully acted and warmly amusing.
True crime refused to go away, Joe Berlinger giving us the intense and pictorially brilliant, Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer, his kaleidoscopic narrative documentary, in which the filmmaker parsed and deconstructed a series of shocking murders that occurred in late 1979 that appalled even hardened cops who were trying to maintain order over the relatively lawless place called Times Square in New York.
And director Skye Borgman was everywhere for Netflix during the year. Her I Just Killed My Dad, the extraordinary story of Anthony Templet, a 17-year-old boy who one dark night in Louisiana’s Baton Rouge shot his father with a heavy calibre handgun, one of two he owned. The boy then patiently waited for the police to come, and it was an empathetic piece of brilliant TV journalism.
She also gave us the remarkable, horrifying, Girl in the Picture, the tale of a young mother’s death and her son’s subsequent kidnapping, both presumably at the hands of her much older husband in the 1990s.
David Simon returned with We Own This City, the compelling HBO series, which explores one of the most disturbing police corruption scandals in American history: the barefaced, wanton criminality of an entire city police plainclothes unit. For a quarter of a century, Simon and his team of collaborators, some of them the great crime novelists of our era like George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, have been making demanding and unconventional dramas for HBO about the problems of people trying to get by in American cities, “in which indifferent institutions have more rights than human beings”.
The ABC also grabbed us with several documentaries, both very different in style but engrossing and entertaining. Science of Drugs with Richard Roxburgh, was a highly diverting series from director and writer Anja Taylor that looked to redress the balance in the way drugs are viewed, science so often a mismatch with drug policy.
And the ABC again scored a winner with Old People’s Home for Teenagers, the documentary series that’s another kind of social experiment into the dynamics of intergenerational contact. The hope was that this investigation might be used clinically and therapeutically to improve the health and emotional disposition of both elderly people living in nursing facilities and vulnerable teenagers. And it seemed to work. Clever, often amusing and empathetic TV.
The ABC’s drama, Significant Others, from writer and creator Tommy Murphy, was terrific too. It deals, often uncomfortably, with the complexities of families and the unlovely spaces of relationships between siblings, especially where money and property are involved.
And at the end of the year Michael Winterbottom’s remarkable This England, based on the first pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2022 in the UK, was a frantic fly-on-the-wall, immersive account of the way the British authorities initially responded to Covid. Or didn’t, as it turned out. Great performance from Kenneth Branagh as hapless Boris Johnson, newly ensconced prime minister, comically swaggering and constantly reciting Shakespeare.
And The English, Hugo Blick’s highly intelligent, wonderfully immersive reconsideration of the revisionist western, a revenge pursuit thriller set in 1890, on the cusp of the frontier’s closure. And it features a wonderfully cast parade of grasping tyrants and manic outlaws, fortune-seekers and drifters struggling towards some sense of common cause.
A great year and tomorrow it starts all over again. Bring it on.
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