Living Dangerously: The Best of 2022

My write-up of 2022, following 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

2022 marks a decade since my first entry here. I’ve gotten so tired writing this blog. Not tired of writing it, but tired of swimming against the tide. Earlier this month I changed the blog title from “That’s Alls I Know” — which was the title Philip chose when he birthday-gifted me this site in 2012, a nod to one of my favorite Murphy Brown episodes — to the less cryptic “TV Matters.” I liked the pun of “TV Matters,” but mostly, the words rang true: I felt like I was forever standing up for shows that were deemed inconsequential. This has been a brutal year for me and TV. Shows I enjoyed — The Offer and The Time Traveler’s Wife, to name two — were thoroughly trashed by critics. The magnificent Back to Life (which wrapped up late in 2021) got no Emmy love, but the bland sophomore season of Ted Lasso received nods for pretty much anyone in the cast with three speaking lines or more. My favorite new comedy of 2022, Minx, garnered rave reviews and a renewal, then had the rug pulled out from under it while filming for Season 2 was underway. And finally, I sat through White Lotus and Let the Right One In back-to-back every Sunday night, sadly aware that the former — a lackluster season that played like an assignment, that seemed more interested in generating memes than themes — was getting all the buzz, while the latter — a vibrant, disturbing series about family sacrifice — was being left to languish. My hopes seem to be dashed at regular intervals nowadays. Shows I feel passionately about die quick deaths, and shows in which I see little value go on and on. And let’s face it: TV was always like that. The shows you prized the most too often broke your heart. But it didn’t used to happen weekly.

As always, Philip and I watched a whole lot of TV this past year, so narrowing it down to “10 Best” and “10 Honorable Mentions” wasn’t easy. And as ever, there’s a whole lot we still haven’t gotten around to — I wish I had the time — so if I finally get through the late-fall entries that I’m currently enjoying (e.g., Fleishman Is in Trouble) and feel there’s something I should have acknowledged here, I’ll revise the list accordingly — or give it its own column. There were shows I quite liked in 2022 that just missed my top 20: Somebody Somewhere, Slow Horses, Stay Close, The Afterparty, Sherwood and Dark Winds instantly come to mind. There were shows that fell a tier below those; I had my quibbles (sometimes plenty of them), but they didn’t deter me for tuning in: Reacher, Young Wallender, The Old Man, Night Sky and Moonhaven, to name five.

Then there were the shows that I thought were just plain bad, but stuck with them; because I had praised them so vociferously in previous columns, I kept praying they would turn around: the second seasons of Superman & Lois and The Righteous Gemstones, the former done in by a charisma-free supervillain; the final seasons of After Life and Bull, the latter done in by a pair of well-meaning but misguided new showrunners; and the latest go-rounds of Barry and Snowfall. (There was a time I had proclaimed Barry and Snowfall among the best that TV had to offer, but that came to an end in 2022, with senseless character leaps in the former and sketchy, inert plotting in the latter — and both wasting an episode by sending their anti-hero on a drug-fueled fantasy. At some point, someone in Hollywood must have decided that hallucinogenic epiphanies were a suitable substitute for character development; they were mistaken.) And then there were the buzzy shows I bailed on early; they received praise from some critics, and even managed some Emmy love, but I have no idea what people saw in them, and you know, life’s too short: Severance, Reboot, American Gigolo, Under the Banner of Heaven, Season 2 of The Flight Attendant, and the worst of the bunch, The Gilded Age. (Julian Fellowes has certainly developed a formula, and he works it to death, but what he seems to have forgotten is that we loved Downton Abbey’s first three seasons so much because they didn’t feel formulaic.) As always, if you want to hear why those shows didn’t send me, just ask away. I’m an open book.

But those were the anomalies: the shows I stuck with despite their being bad, or the ones I tuned into because of the buzz, then quickly turned off. Mostly my TV viewing this year was chock-full of satisfying programming, as you'll see in my top 10 list and my 10 honorable mentions. But before we get to those, let’s indulge in something a little different, because I myself have frequently been described that way: a little different. It’s all well and good to praise series and seasons, but sometimes TV’s greatest pleasures emerge in single episodes of shows that you otherwise wouldn’t think to talk about: the sole highlight of a terrible season; or a strong installment of a merely promising new series; or a brief return to form for a show that’s lost its way. I'm going to spotlight ten of those episodes here, because all were among my “best of 2022.” The series themselves aren't ones I'd think to praise, but these episodes don't deserve to be buried either.

So Help Me Todd, a steadily improving new comedy-drama with Marcia Gay Harden as a lawyer and Skylar Astin as her son and in-house investigator, plays best when the protagonists work in tandem rather than at odds, and “Long Lost Lawrence” benefited from having all of Harden’s onscreen children assist her with her latest case. It was a smart primer on how dysfunctional family dynamics can be (briefly) overcome, and a splendid way to spend the Thanksgiving holiday. Armando Iannucci’s Avenue 5 felt formless and aimless in its second season, but the penultimate episode, “I Love Judging People,” was a deliciously nasty piece of work, in which passengers and crew — upon discovering that only half of them would survive an incoming missile attack — privately ranked each other to determine who lived and who died. The sluggish, nostalgia-fueled Picard is made all the worse by Patrick Stewart’s inability to summon up his old authority, but the second episode of the second season, “Penance,” handed the baton to Jeri Ryan, and the results proved lively, surprising, imaginative — everything you wish the series could be. For a while, near the end of its first season, FBI: International became the best of the three FBI shows, and the March entry “Shouldn’t Have Left Her,” a showcase for supporting player Carter Redwood (penned by showrunner Derek Haas), was an impressively taut hour of procedural television. And although For All Mankind, in its third season, ratcheted up the sort of soap opera that I feel has been its undoing (“I slept with my commander’s wife, and I’m still pining for her”), “Seven Minutes of Terror” featured a deep-space calamity en route to Mars that briefly recaptured the show’s appeal: of ordinary people committing extraordinary acts of bravery.

Breeders recovered a bit from its lackluster sophomore season, then fell apart in its third-season finale, but near the end, in “No Way Back,” Alun Armstrong and Joanna Bacon — previously used as supporting comic relief — took center stage alongside Martin Freeman, and reminded you why the show had once felt so cathartic. Survivor slogged through a couple of tepid seasons (42 and 43) but the penultimate episode of the latter, “Telenovela,” was a terrific reminder of how invigorating the series can still be when there’s great gameplay involved (which explains why, when I don’t have anything else to watch, I keep returning to Survivor: Micronesia). Murderville — in which Will Arnett, as detective Terry Seattle, invites a weekly celebrity to help solve a homicide (except the celebrity is given no script) — rose and fell on the strength of its guest stars’ improvisational skills, but the Christmas episode, “Who Killed Santa?”, featured a pair of wise-ass farceurs, Jason Bateman and Maya Rudolph, who were more than capable of holding their own against Arnett. And the action-adventure series Blood & Treasure lost a bit of its mojo in its second season; although co-creators Stephen Scaia and Matthew Federman promoted the fact that the lead characters — played by the engaging Matt Barr and Sofia Pernas — would no longer be on the run from authorities, that format change somehow diminished their latest mission. What had been a compelling chase became a mere hunt. But two episodes at the center of the season, “The Ravens of Shangri-La” and “The Lost City of Sana,” introducing Barr’s onscreen father Mark Valley (and directed by Scaia, who's become an impressive helmer). proved the perfect blend of devious plotting and honest sentiment that had distinguished Season 1.

And now — finally — onto the year’s best shows. (In cases where I reviewed a show in greater detail when it premiered, I've hyperlinked the title to my original review.)

Let’s start with my 10 Honorable Mentions, in rising order of favor: Around the World in 80 Days, Ashley Pharaoh’s adaptation of the Jules Verne classic: a party you end up enjoying much more than you expected, in which David Tennant — by resisting the urge to ensure everyone has a good time — proves the perfect host; Essex Serpent, a moody adaptation of Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel, with Claire Danes so charismatic — like an Amazon warrior set down in an Essex fishing village — that you fully understand why pretty much every man in the cast wants to fuck, marry or kill her; The Offer, Michael Tolan’s facile work about the business of making movies (in the case, The Godfather), with a typecast-defying turn by Matthew Goode, who — as Robert Evans — conveys the burden of being both visionary and voluptuary; Our Flag Means Death, David Jenkins’ genre-defying, gender-bending tale of an 18th century landowner who gives up everything, its premise drawn from the adventures of real-life “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and what has been dubbed “the worst midlife crisis on record”; The Sandman, the best comic book adaptation I’ve seen since the first season of The Punisher back in 2017: impressive for its faithfulness to — and visual and tonal mastery of — Neil Gaiman’s innovative blend of dark fantasy, supernatural horror and ironic humor, which — in the early 1990’s — turned him into a cultural icon.

And the last five, any of which could have slipped into my top 10: The Responder, with Martin Freeman as an urgent response officer working the night shift in Liverpool, and the best kind of star vehicle: one that makes great use of Freeman’s defiantly agreeable onscreen persona while letting him flex his acting muscles; The Devil’s Hour, a horror-infused mystery from Tom Moran — a paranormal procedural, you might call it — grounded by exceptional performances by Jessica Raine, Nikesh Patel and Peter Capaldi; The Time Traveler’s Wife, in which Steven Moffat imbues Audrey Niffenegger’s lugubrious novel with structure, pace and a sharper wit (ably assisted by the combustible Theo James and Rose Leslie, who convince at every stage of their onscreen lives); The Bear, Christopher Storer’s splendid drama about a chef from the world of fine dining who is forced to return to his hometown of Chicago to run the family sandwich shop — marred, to my mind, only by a couple of characters who seemed contrary merely for the sake of generating conflict; and Inside Man, David Tennant and Stanley Tucci in Moffat's latest original, a thriller of the "bonkers but brilliant" variety that gleefully warps your sense of decency.

And now my Top 10 for 2022.

10. Ghosts Season 2 (CBS, BBC iPlayer): I can pinpoint the moment, early in Season 2, when I felt Ghosts start to live up to its potential — but first, let’s bring newcomers up to speed. The premise: a young married couple, Samantha and Jay (Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar), leave their lives in New York City to move into a country house she’s inherited — with hopes of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. But a near-death experience gives Sam the ability to see the eight ghosts who are residing in her new home — the ones who died on the property and haven’t yet been whisked away to their heavenly rest (a process that they’ve come to describe over the years — with no understanding of modern-day slang — as “being sucked off”). From earliest to most recently deceased, that would be Thor, a 10th-century Viking; Sass, a Lenape Native American; Isaac, a closeted Revolutionary War officer; Hetty, the manor’s first owner; Alberta, an African-American jazz-age singer; Flower, a 60’s hippie chick; Pete, a Girl Scout troop leader; and Trevor, a ’90s Wall Street trader. The ghosts were given distinctive personalities — and were cast to perfection — and the joke that elevated much of the first season was that Jay was not only clued in to the ghosts’ existence, but became fascinated by them, and at times found clever ways to interact. Ghosts is based on the 2019 BBC series of the same name, and although it felt confident from the start, it also seemed like a show that stubbornly refused to catch fire. But it came into its own in Season 2, as so many great sitcoms do. And here’s the moment when my affection for Ghosts grew by leaps and bounds — the tiniest of moments that no doubt seemed marvelous only to me, but isn’t that how these things often happen? Sam, anxious to relaunch her journalism career, has decided to do a podcast about Alberta, whose killer has never been identified. The plan quickly goes south, devastating Alberta, and Sam is left to do damage control. She decides to use Pete as a scapegoat, and with the ghosts all gathered in the foyer, improvises to Alberta, “Honestly, wasn’t the podcast, like, Pete’s idea? It’s kind of his fault.” Pete, who harbors a crush on Alberta, is aghast — “What are you doing, Sam?” — but Sam proceeds full steam ahead: “And just so you know, Pete agrees with me.” And Alberta shuts her down —“Girl!” — leaving Sam to confess, deflated, “I forgot you could see him.” And I roared. For a year, Sam had been filling in Jay on what the ghosts were saying: conveying what was needed for plot purposes, omitting the rest, and occasionally — when something had gone astray on her watch or she didn’t have time for exposition — fibbing about the running (ghostly) commentary. And now she’s so flustered, she forgets herself and tries to dupe one of the ghosts in the same manner. The show had mastered the rules, I realized, and was now learning how to exploit them for maximum effect — and how to run variations on them. The promise I saw in “Alberta’s Podcast” was realized through the remainder of 2022. Insights into the ghosts’ lives and deaths made for good story-lines, as did Sam and Jay’s efforts to secure and please their first guests — but it was in the mix-and-match of the routine and the unearthly in which the show shined, and in devising solutions that required both human and ghostly intervention. As Season 2 progressed, the ghosts developed beyond the one-note characterizations that had defined them. (Thor, who’d been used for his bluster, began to indulge in endless — and often disturbing — Viking reminiscences; he became the Rose Nylund of the group. And Flower, who had been there mostly to miss the point, developed a surprisingly deadpan delivery.) And as the characters became more well-rounded, the potential for laughs multiplied. Gather a large cast of disparate types, give them good material, and you have something that’s been missing on TV for the longest time: repartée. Not just the fun of banter, but the elegance of repartée. Ghosts has become one of those glorious shows where every line seems like a punchline. You barely need setup, because one line can generate a slew of laughs — as the responses ricochet from ghost to ghost to ghost: each one boasting a distinct background and temperament, a singular relationship to Sam, Jay and their fellow spirits, and particular priorities that consume them as they’re waiting to be sucked off. The series doesn’t shy away from the sentimental, and in fact, some of the season’s best moments have been among its sweetest. But where Season 2 has really stepped it up is in both sharpening and expanding the ghosts’ personalities, and in the writers’ resulting realization that they no longer have to settle for one punchline when they can nail three or four — or eight.

9. Welcome to Wrexham Season 1 (FX, Disney+ UK): If you’re not into sports, Welcome to Wrexham will help explain why seemingly everyone else is. With Ted Lasso having lost its way in its sophomore season, Welcome to Wrexham now serves as the best reminder of the pleasures to be found in following the fortunes of a UK football team. Except this team is real. Film star Ryan Reynolds reached out to TV star Rob McElhenney in 2018 to compliment him on an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; two years later, they decided to celebrate their budding bromance by purchasing a Welsh football team. (It’s the Hollywood equivalent of a friendship ring.) They then decided to turn that acquisition — and the team’s first season under their new ownership — into a series for Hulu, settling on a format that was equal parts documentary and reality show. It could’ve come off as the height of self aggrandizement and self promotion: two puffed-up Hollywood stars chronicling their latest investment. But instead it’s charming. The showbiz element is kept at bay. The focus is on this Welsh town where football is far more than a spectator sport; it’s a tradition, a livelihood and a passion. The series is careful not to sanitize or romanticize the town of Wrexham. On the contrary, when the players are suffering through a losing streak, we see just how cutthroat the fans can be, as they take to social media to bully a struggling player. But let the team start to rack up wins, and they’re the pride of the community and an inspiration to its youth, who are roused by the players’ sense of collaboration and cooperation. And just as the series doesn’t sugarcoat the town, it’s equally frank about the machinations behind the scenes at the club. When Wrexham’s new manager decides to let a player go, he doesn’t come right out and fire him, which — heaven forbid — might paint him as a villain; he cloaks the dismissal as “an opportunity [for the team member] to play more,” even though he has no prospects elsewhere. The tug-of-war between the way people choose to present themselves (the reality show aspect) and the facts that the camera captures in “real time” (the documentary aspect) is part of what makes the texture of Welcome to Wrexham feel so fresh. As for Reynolds and McElhenney, they come off like the least savvy of businessmen; the opening episodes make it clear that they had money to burn, so they indulged in a flight of fancy. But what later episodes amplify is that they come to care about this town, and realize they share responsibility for its future. Their transformation from wannabe moguls to adopted sons is one of the most absorbing aspects of Welcome to Wrexham. The series lays it on a little thick in the final few episodes, but Reynolds and McElhenney are so forthcoming about their shortcomings, you cut them a whole lot of slack. It feels fitting that these two oddballs were drawn to this struggling town; it’s a football match made in heaven. Welcome to Wrexham — seemingly the slightest of vehicles — succeeds on a number of levels: as a deep dive into a struggling town whose fate is dependent on the success of its football team; as a cheeky chronicle of the kind of venture that only a couple of Hollywood hotshots would gamble on; and as a suspense story that has you on the edge of your seat, as you tune in weekly to see if Wrexham AFC will finally win promotion after a whopping 14 years in the National League, the lowest level of professional football in England. Ultimately, although you recognize the absurdity of your own responses, every time Wrexham scores a goal and it’s totaled on the board, or the league rankings appear on the screen and Wrexham inches its way up or down, those figures come to seem as consequential as the movements of the Doomsday Clock. A pitch as trifling as that of Welcome to Wrexham shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does; it’s the year’s sunniest surprise.

8. Strange New Worlds Season 1 (Paramount+): Ostensibly the most innocuous of the modern-day Star Trek spinoffs, but in most ways, the best. And its ace in the hole: Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise. As introduced on the second season of Discovery, he had been mostly charged with asserting his decency, to assure us — after Jason Isaacs’ first-season captain proved to be a doppelgänger — that we were once again getting a good guy in the captain’s chair. On Strange New Worlds, freed from that responsibility, Mount can relax — and not merely relax, but enjoy himself. There’s a twinkle in his eye and a spark to his delivery that are irresistible — and contagious. Mount seems to take delight in upending expectations and refreshing conventions. He has the calmest of tones at the most urgent of times; given the need for an eleventh-hour speech (“I believe today will not be our last mission, but our finest hour”), he makes it sound not inspirational, but merely practical — yet his practicality proves inspiring. Mount takes indirect and surprising routes towards familiar destinations. And his sense of humor is a delight. You don’t expect a Star Trek captain to resort to comedy stylings, but Mount does it repeatedly, unapologetically: double takes, asides to the imaginary studio audience. It’s full-on sitcom delivery at times, and it gives the franchise a buoyancy you don’t expect, and makes the darker installments register all the more forcefully. (And his hair has a life of its own; it’s the most irreverent of props.) The playfulness in Mount’s performances invites his fellow cast members to forego the mission-oriented nature of the franchise in developing their characters: to figure out not who they are when pushed to the brink, but who they are when they’re not — when they’re merely relaxing, or socializing, or trading secrets, or bolstering each other’s egos. The traditional Star Trek manifesto asks of each crew member: what do you bring to the team? Strange New Worlds says, screw that. It asks its actors: what do you bring to the screen? Lead with all the quirks and flaws that define you — and then we’ll bring those qualities to each mission and see what evolves. And because the writers and actors spend so much time imagining and depicting the characters’ foibles — a lot of the series is unforced banter in corridors and in restaurants, on lifts and off duty — the series achieves a dimensionality that sets it apart from its predecessors. Oh, on the surface, Discovery and Picard seem weightier, more sophisticated, more “adult.” But Strange New Worlds lets its characters dictate tone and story; it’s, to my mind, the first Star Trek series that seems genuinely character- rather than plot-driven — and to my mind, that’s a huge upgrade for the franchise. That said, for all its prowess in the characterization department, Strange New Worlds also packed more variety and story-telling skill into a 10-episode season than I would have imagined: not just the introduction of a major foe, but a rematch; a body-switching caper (or as Spock is wont to call it, “hijinks”); a long-lost romance that ends in betrayal; the death of a core character; and, in an inspired late-season entry, an entire episode played as a fairy-tale, as the crew members become characters in a children’s book that the ship’s doctor has been reading to his daughter. (The cast clearly relished the opportunity to play against type.) And let’s face it, we’ve seen most of these plots dozens of times. But what became clear early on is that Strange New Worlds is adept at taking time-worn tropes and making them feel fresh. Exposition feels novel and solutions seem striking because they’re being relayed and devised by a singular crew: one that’s devoted to the missions but not defined by them. There wasn’t a core character who wasn’t useful and distinctive, and thought was given to the shared histories, common goals and plot reveals that might lead to interesting pairings. There was a lot of talk about how Strange New Worlds eschewed the current Star Trek format by remaining largely episodic, but there were solid subplots scattered throughout the season; to my mind, it was a confident blend of standalone and serialized drama. If I have any reservations about Season 1, it was that the writers chose to conclude it with a stunt: an episode drawn from one from the original series, showing how a familiar scenario might have played out under different leadership. It was a decent installment, but it was immeasurably better if you knew the original episode that was, in some cases, being reproduced shot for shot. Quite frankly, the show is too good to resort to that kind of fan service. Strange New Worlds is easily the most inviting of the new Star Trek series, and the one most likely to corral new audiences; don’t punish them for coming to the franchise a half-century late.

7. The Ipcress File (ITV, AMC+): This six-part adaptation of Len Deighton's '60s spy novel flew under the radar. Perhaps people figured that the acclaimed 1965 film was the last word on the subject, and there wasn’t much more to say. It turns out there was so much more to say. It’s 1963, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, and a nuclear scientist has been kidnapped by enemy agents. Major Dalby — who runs a secret intelligence service not affiliated with MI-5 or MI-6 — decides his best bet for finding him lies with Harry Palmer, a former British soldier who’s been locked away in a German prison for selling contraband. (He has history with one of the kidnappers.) The working-class Harry is an unlikely spy, but he has great instincts; his background allows him empathy for — and insight into — the very people he’s investigating. He’s paired with Jean Courtney, a socialite who’s feeling the heat of keeping her job a secret. In an early scene, Harry and Jean, who’ve only briefly met, have their first real tête-à-tête, when he returns to his Berlin flat to find her waiting for him. Their ensuing exchange — cross-questioning disguised as polite conversation — sets the tone for everything to come. They’re seated perhaps ten feet apart, facing each other, like an interrogation — but who is interrogating whom? It’s a set-up for how the rest of The Ipcress File is going to work: every exchange — however slight, however seemingly innocent — is going to play like an interrogation. An interrogation where both sides are on the attack. Information is at a premium, and these agents will do whatever it takes to get it. The formula could get tiresome — we’ve all seen countless spy thrillers — but writer John Hodge is a master at varying the tricks. The moment you start to get too comfortable, he‘ll flip perspective, or fracture the linear nature of the timeline. He’s as cagy as the spies themselves. Hodge expands the Deighton novel into a six-part teleplay by adding a whole lot of plot — but surprise: it’s all good plot. There’s a shrewd backstory for Harry, a solid detour for Dalby, plus a smart expansion of Jean’s role. (And the stakes are raised considerably in the brainwashing plot that consumes the final reel.) But it doesn’t feel like Hodge is piling on incident merely to keep you busy. He’s piling on incident to keep you on your toes, until you’re alert and informed enough to gain the upper hand on his own characters. The Ipcress File is six episodes of viewer indoctrination. You come away a bit wiser and a little less trusting. You come away with a greater attention to detail and a far more evolved bullshit detector. It’s the rare teleplay that dares the viewer to do better — and succeeds. I can't remember the last time a show left me quite so invigorated. You too can think like a spy, Hodge insists; you might not be able to spot a car bomb 20 feet away, but you can learn to read a room. You can learn to ask the right questions. You can learn to doubt the evidence of your eyes — and to avoid listening to your heart. Hodge’s teleplay requires strict attention — not to absorb the facts (the facts mean nothing), but to turn them into clever and useful deductions. (By episode 5, I’d developed such a healthy suspicion of what I’d seen, and grown so resistant to even the most reliable of narrators, that I spotted a subterfuge half an episode ahead of Dalby. I was quite pleased with myself.) The three leads — Joe Cole as Harry, Lucy Boynton as Jean, and Tom Hollander as Dalby — are irreproachable, and Hodge’s teleplay is really built. He senses exactly when to add characters, when to shift focus, how much to reveal and how much to withhold — and he understands how to get under your skin. He knows when to fool you, and when to challenge you. He’s like the smoothest of intelligence officers; he gets you on his side.

6. Let the Right One In (Showtime): Based on a best-selling Swedish novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (which has already been adapted into a Swedish film, an American film by Matt Reeves, and even a stage production), this new Showtime series had a lot to live up to — but what emerged on the small screen was damn near perfect. Let the Right One In — in its previous incarnations — focuses on a lonely boy who befriends a girl who turns out to be a vampire; it’s vampirism as a metaphor for the pangs of adolescence. Series creator Andrew Hinderaker retains the premise, but flips it. He turns it into the story of a father, Mark Kane, whose daughter was infected with a virus that turned her into a vampire, and who’s spent the last decade searching for a cure. He’s followed the latest set of leads to New York City; he takes up residence in a low-rent high-rise, where his next-door neighbor turns out to be a cop working the very case that caught his attention: a killer who’s shredding his victims, who Mark believes might be a vampire. The father and the cop are investigating the same case from different angles — all while living down the hall from each other. And their kids — vampire Eleanor (Ellie for short) and 12-year-old Isaiah, a sweet nerd who’s an easy target for bullies — become fast friends. Hinderaker doesn’t tiptoe around the coincidences. He presents them as part of the premise, then plunges you right into the action. Mark has gotten good at hunting down lowlifes whose actions are so despicable that he, a devout Catholic, can justify killing them — to procure Ellie the human blood she needs to survive. But a decade of slaughter — with so little to show for it — is eating away at him, and Demián Bichir’s features betray a decade of torment; his face seem hollowed out by guilt and shame. (Let the Right One In bills itself as a “psychological horror drama,” and that’s just about right. It’s about the literal sacrifices parents make for their children.) But there’s another side to the series that’s just as crucial to its success. If Bichir radiates torment, Anika Noni Rose — as Naomi Cole, the cop next door — radiates warmth. It’s Rose who permits the series to take the occasional detour onto a more domestic route; at times, as you’re watching Mark and Naomi and their kids, you might start to imagine you’re watching a blended-family drama, perhaps of the Hallmark variety. Bichir is surrounded by actors with a welcoming presence — it’s crucial to the design. As Ellie, who’s spent a decade trapped in a 12-year-old body, Madison Taylor Baez serves up a remarkable performance for one so young. You understand how her sheltered existence leads her to bond with a pre-teen who’s feeling odd and anxious. But living for a decade in a 12-year-old body has made her a complicated creature. On the surface she looks like a suitable friend for Isaiah — but when she crawls into bed next to him, to comfort him, there’s something disturbing about it. He’s ingenuous in a way she’ll never again be. And conversely, when she confronts an older vampire near the end of the season, we see all the signs of young womanhood waiting to blossom — but the growing pains she’s been denied and the life lessons left unlearned allow her to be easily manipulated, as a child would be. Hinderaker refuses to define Ellie as “a 22-year-old in a 12-year-old body“; he creates something more nuanced and unsettling, and Baez — as if otherworldly in her own right — captures it all. There’s a lot of setup in Let the Right One In, but nothing that feels like setup. There are twists you don’t see coming, and a stunner of a narrative reset in episode 5. And its themes are beautifully unstressed: how Mark’s protectiveness has rubbed off on Ellie, leading her to look after Isaiah; how Ellie and Isaiah's bond stems from a shared sense of solitary; and how Mark and Naomi‘s easy friendship springs from a common understanding of the challenges of caring for a special child. As reconceived for the small screen, Let the Right One In is about parents and children. It’s about the lessons we pass on to our children without ever realizing it, and about the legacies we receive from our parents without ever knowing it. Most everyone in Let the Right One In has been scarred: by what they’ve seen, by what they’ve done. It’s a series about the savage world we’ve left to our children — and our powerlessness to help them navigate it. These are big themes, and Hinderaker balances them beautifully. And he knows, too, how to offset them. For a drama so consumed with suffering and slaughter, the mood of Let the Right One In often turns uncommonly bright — festive, even. It’s all part of Hinderaker’s plan. He understands that it’s hope that gets us through the horror — and it’s hope that prolongs it.

5. Life After Life (BBC Two): Every time Ursula Todd’s life ends, it starts again. Not where it left off, but where it all began, with her birth at the family manse in rural Buckinghamshire in 1910. She relives her history, or however much history fate allows her this time. Her childhood is fraught with tragedy: a drowning at sea, a deadly fall from a bedroom window — and with each fatality, her clock is reset to the moment of her birth. Her multiple existences have left Ursula with a disconcerting sense of déjà vu that she can’t seem to shake. After the family maid, in several of Ursula‘s prior lives, infects her with a fatal case of Spanish flu that she picked up at the armistice celebrations, Ursula’s latest incarnation senses it’s somehow crucial the maid stay home that weekend — but unable to give proper voice to her mounting conviction, Ursula takes drastic action by causing her injury and preventing her trip. As viewers, we understand that Ursula just altered her destiny and prolonged her life, but she herself can’t grasp what led her to an uncharacteristic act of violence, and of course, her actions and demeanor are inexplicable to her family. Her mother sends her to a psychiatrist, who can offer no explanation for Ursula’s odd behavior and sense of dread, but neither does he dismiss her feelings of déjà vu — posturing that perhaps she’s experiencing something similar to the Hindu concept of reincarnation, where we’re reborn enough times to ultimately achieve enlightenment. But critically, unlike so many of these Groundhog Day-like offerings, there’s no riddle here for Ursula to solve, no life goal she’s meant to fulfill. What the doctor offers her is merely a philosophy, not a solution; this is simply the unrelenting arc of Ursula’s life, remaining ever a mystery to her. She struggles to find her way in an uncertain world, haunted by the ominous feelings that consume her, but guided on occasion by an intuition that grows too strong to ignore. Thomasin McKenzie (The Power of the Dog, Jojo Rabbit) plays Ursula from late adolescence through adulthood, and it’s the most luminous performance yet in an already impressive career. As expressively directed by Brooklyn’s John Crowley — from a teleplay by celebrated playwright Bash Doran, based on Kate Atkinson’s 2013 novel — Life After Life showers Ursula with incident upon incident, but she never seems like a pawn in a cosmic game of chess. Some experiences she embraces, others she merely shoulders, and a few threaten to break her spirit — but her curiosity, her courage and her devotion to her younger brother Teddy remain her constants. Boasting an impressive supporting cast, including Sian Clifford and James McArdle as Ursula's parents and Jessica Brown Findlay as her trailblazing Aunt Izzie, Life After Life is shot and played with delicacy and restraint (much like the falling snowflakes that appear each time Ursula’s flame is extinguished), yet it refuses to downplay the punishingly painful experiences to which Ursula is subjected, including sexual assault, backstreet abortion, spousal abuse and — in one of the bleakest episodes — family life in World War II Germany that descends into starvation. It shies away from the comforting tropes we’ve come to expect of “period dramas,” and as such, Life After Life would be the most engrossing of series even if it lacked the conceit at its core. But it’s that very layering — of the extraordinary onto the commonplace, of the disquieting onto the merely disturbing — that gives the piece its texture and its pulse. Ursula is only rarely allowed to lead a full life that ends in old age; more frequently, the unluckiness of her character and the uncertainty of her circumstances see her future cut tragically short. But the barrage of fatal blows never come to seem predictable or absurd. If anything, Atkinson’s novel feels even more timely in 2022 than it did when it was first published: the precariousness of our lives has become a theme of our daily existence, and Life After Life gives voice to a world on edge. “Hasn’t there been enough suffering?” Ursula’s mother wails, as the Spanish flu descends on their secluded middle-class lives, even as they’re enduring the trauma of a world at war. But despite the number of times Ursula‘s life is rebooted — some for the better, many for the worse — the miniseries never takes on a feeling of futility; the emphasis isn’t on the deaths, but on the multiple lives that Ursula leads: what she achieves or what she learns, and how valiantly she soldiers on. It evokes that age-old saying that “life is meant to be lived“ — and does it so gently, yet so affirmingly, that it seems like the perfect show for these troubling times. Life After Life was as moving as anything I saw in 2022; sadly, no American network has chosen to air or stream it. Ah, well, perhaps in some other lifetime…

4. Minx (HBO Max — well, sort of): The best new comedy I saw in 2022: not just a vivid evocation of life in America in the early ‘70s, but a resolutely apt analogy for life in America in 2022. Creator Ellen Rapoport doesn’t linger over its relevance to our own era, but she doesn’t need to. All the topics Minx takes on feel timely: issues of privacy, women’s rights, minority rule, political hypocrisy, separation of church and state. And more than any of those, Minx takes aim at those insecure men — both then and now — who find nothing more threatening than an informed woman. That’s its principal target, and here Rapoport hits the bull’s-eye. The informed woman in this case is one Joyce Prigger, who has channeled her Vassar education and Twenty-something enthusiasm into educating the public; she’s got a magazine idea she’s eager to pitch entitled The Matriarchy Awakens. Her content is confrontational, and so is Joyce; she’s well informed and well intentioned, but she’s so caught up in her cause, she can’t see how her bold ideas need to be cloaked and couched for mass consumption. No one can see Joyce’s potential: no one, that is, except porn publisher Doug Renetti. Doug might be crass and tactless — of The Matriarchy Awakens, he insists, “When I read it, I feel like a fucking teacher’s yelling at me” — but unlike Joyce, he knows how to pitch it. Here’s how he educates potential advertisers: “Women’s liberation. I’ll tell you what it means to me. It means liberating women from the $400,000 of disposable income they spend every year.” That’s all they need to hear. But for Joyce, the publishing deal comes with a price. How does Doug envision getting eyeballs to this upstart magazine, newly christened Minx? How do you get women interested in articles about birth control and sexual harassment and identity politics? With male centerfolds. “It’s like when you give a pill to a dog,” Doug explains to Joyce, “you have to hide the medicine. You put it in peanut butter. Peanut butter is nude men.” And Joyce grudgingly agrees, but wants to make her position crystal clear: “Yes, but our penis is for political purposes, OK? It’s about shifting power dynamics and gender reparations.” Who talks like that? Well, Joyce does. She seems to come from a world where metaphors are currency, and pretension has power. When she brings home Minx’s first centerfold model (a fireman, and an airhead) to prep him for an interview, she offers him a drink — and he asks if she has a beer. “No, I do not,” she insists (at times, wearing her Vassar degree like a badge of honor, she makes it seem like even contractions are beneath her) — then proudly informs the fireman: “I have a lovely Pouilly Fuisse.” With Joyce around, the jokes practically write themselves. In the real world, no one would want to get within five feet of this chick; onscreen, you can’t get enough of her. And that all comes down to Ophelia Lovibond, giving the rare comic turn these days that feels genuinely iconic. Watching her, your thoughts might well go to some of the screen’s great screwball comediennes. She’s got some of the primness that Jean Arthur's characters used to effect, because they'd been taught it was proper. Irene Dunne did that same trick with her upper lip that Lovibond manages here: holding it a touch too high, conveying smugness and unease, yet also an eagerness that's irresistible. And as Joyce evolves, her epiphanies grow euphoric, the way Carole Lombard’s did. Like Lombard, Lovibond is enlivened by the puncturing of her own pretenses. Joyce could easily come off as too strident, too inflexible, too obtuse; she could digress into a parody of a second-wave feminist who holds so tight to her beliefs that she can’t embrace life. But Lovibond sees to it that you’re too caught up in Joyce’s charm and determination — not to mention her intellectual acuity. You love how in love she is with her own self-assurance, even when it’s misguided. And occasionally, her pronouncements prove unexpectedly pithy. (When Doug expresses surprise that people are actually turning out for magazine’s first press event, Joyce responds with uncharacteristic brevity: “Our magazine is a jolt of something new. It’s a whisper and a scream.”) The fun of Minx lies in watching Joyce and Doug find middle ground, at that unlikely point where the feminist movement and the porn industry meet. The ten-episode season loses a bit of steam near the end — as Joyce and Doug are separated for plot purposes — but my enthusiasm for Minx remains undiminished by its final two episodes not quite soaring to the heights of the previous eight. What Rapoport forged here is indeed, like the fictional magazine it chronicles, a jolt of something new. It’s at once a whisper and a scream. It’s also a blast. HBO Max, as noted, shelved its second season just as production was wrapping, one of several shows CEO David Zaslav canned to secure a tax write-off. Word is that Season 2 is being shopped to other networks, so once again — as life forever imitates art — we rejoin Joyce at the “pitch” stage, hoping her outlook and her product will appeal to the men with the money. Plus ça change, as Joyce no doubt would say.

3. What We Do in the Shadows Season 4 (FX, Disney+ UK): Season 4 built on all the bawdy brilliance of Season 3 and featured the funniest single episode of television I saw all year, “Private School.” And yet, I confess I had the same initial reservations about the season that I had had about Season 3. I need to stop underestimating the writers. In Season 3, the Vampiric Council — introduced in the season opener — seemed to me too far afield from the “fish out of water” concept that first distinguished the series. But hell, they made it work: turning it into a season-long power play between Nadja and Nandor. In Season 4, one of the first things we heard about was Nadja‘s desire to open a vampire night club, and once again I thought: what does this have to do with four vampires trying to co-exist with a half-million humans on Staten Island? And then there was this genie, and the suggestion that he was going to stick around all season. Was Season 4 going to be overwhelmed by its supernatural elements? Again, I really need to stop worrying about showrunner Paul Simm and his superb team of writers. Season 4 sustained itself, brilliantly, by asking that question that nourishes many a successful sitcom season: what do the characters want? It was a season about Laszlo seeking fulfillment as a parent, in this case to baby Colin Robinson (or as Laszlo refers to him, because accuracy is everything: “the small weird creature that clawed its way out of the abdominal cavity of our deceased former friend Colin Robinson”); about Nandor, following up on his quest for love in Season 3, deciding to settle down as a married man — if only he can find or conjure up the proper partner; about Nadja greedily reinventing herself as an entrepreneur (resulting in what was essentially a season-long nervous breakdown — the story-line justified Natasia Demetriou’s occasionally shrill overplaying); and about dear Guillermo, as ever, simply trying to establish himself as a companion/familiar/bodyguard worthy of the vampires’ respect — and his own. Season 4 took a few episodes to find its footing, but by the time Nadja was engaging in a labor dispute with her staff, while Nandor had hauled Guillermo to the “Night Market” (where supernatural creatures go to haggle and barter) and goaded Guillermo into fighting another familiar, the season felt fully underway. And the next episode, “Private School,” was — to mind — the funniest half-hour the show has ever turned out. It’s the sort of plot that the show not only does best, but that best defines it — where the vampires have to interact with a hallowed human institution to get what they want. (It called to mind the show’s second episode, when they got embroiled in local politics.) With young Colin Robinson about to enter his teen years — and proving more than the vampires can handle — they decide to ship him off to a private school. Next-door neighbor Sean Rinaldi (Anthony Atamanuik, who proved a gift to the show in Season 4) suggests his old alma mater, and arranges for the headmaster to pay the vampires a visit, to interview them. You get a sense of the fun to come when Guillermo begs the vampires to act like “regular human beings who like to do regular human things,” a challenge that they are hopelessly incapable of meeting, but things go off the rails almost immediately when the headmaster poses the most innocent of questions: who are Colin’s parents? It’s a simple query the vampires are at a loss to answer, so Nadja snaps her fingers to hypnotize the headmaster and reset the conversation — and what follows are 12 minutes of chaotic hilarity, as every variation of parents Nadja puts on display (it starts simply, with her and Nandor, then her and Laszlo) proves worse than the last, so she reboots the action once more. When a sad tale Nadja and Laszlo concoct about adopting Colin prompts the headmaster to respond with empathy and encouragement, “I venture to say we have families far less traditional than yours,” Nadja decides they aren't different enough, and Laszlo announces, “We need to be gay” — leaving Laszlo and Nandor to present themselves as Colin’s same-sex parents (or as they subtly signal their sexuality to the headmaster, “You need to know that we’re very gay for each other.” “Completely gay. We are like two French trombones.” “This guy, I ream him nightly”). When the headmaster asks the next obvious question (“Tell me about Colin”) and only Guillermo is able to chime in, Nadja instantly resets to Guillermo as Colin’s single father — until she comes to suspect that what the headmaster really prizes are celebrity parents (or as she puts it with characteristic understatement, “This motherfucker is a starfucker”). A dutiful Laszlo goes out hunting for a well-known face (fortunately, as he notes, “Staten Island is a veritable playground for the glitterati”) and comes back with a hypnotized Sal Vulcano from Impractical Jokers (“Incomprehensible Jesters,” as Laszlo calls it), but when that doesn’t work, they snap his spine — leading to a rapid-fire montage of proposed parents, including Nadja and Sean, Nadja's talking doll (or to put it more accurately, The Doll With The Spirit of Deceased Human Nadja Inhabiting It) as a single mother, Laszlo and the headmaster, and finally Vulcano's corpse and a wild skunk. If it sounds like I’ve spoiled the entire sequence, trust me, I haven’t. You have to see it — and must — because it’s a show at the peak of its powers. And “Private School” ushers in a string of astonishingly good episodes: Nandor’s wedding; a “girl’s night” (they bathe in blood and watch Mamma Mia); an episode even more meta than usual, as the worlds of vampire reality TV and human home improvement intersect; and finally, the collision of Guillermo’s attempts at forging a relationship and Nandor’s season-long quest for the perfect mate. The cast has never been better, and the season was marred only by an inert finale. Simm spoke about how they plot out the first nine episodes meticulously, then wait until the last minute to write the finale. As he told it, I suspect he intended for us to be impressed by their improvisatory skills, but I came away thinking, “I wish you’d given as much thought to the finale as you did to the rest of the season.” But that said, the season as a whole was all shades of brilliant — and those five episodes, in particular, as good as laugh-a-minute TV gets.

2. This Is Going to Hurt (BBC One, AMC+): Adam Kay had a point to make in 2017 when he published This Is Going to Hurt, charting his years as an obstetrics and gynecology trainee: to stand up for the maligned NHS — to pull back the curtain on the long hours, the neglect, the underfunding and the overcrowding. He still makes that point, cogently, in his TV adaptation, but the story on the screen never descends into polemics. This is very much a character study, not a piece of political prose. The Adam Kay of the TV adaptation is a monumental creation: too smart for his own good, yet so earnest in his assumption of his duties that he’s easily the most admirable person on the screen. He’s a smart-aleck surgeon, always ready with a wry remark or a disbelieving smirk. He’s also withering away, day by day. Ben Whishaw is perfectly cast as Kay’s eponymous hero; he always seems to be thinking too fast for the camera, and the fictional Adam is always thinking too fast too. And thinking too much. He can’t seem to set his mind in neutral: he’s stuck in a perpetual state of overdrive. So it feels altogether right that while you’re watching Adam’s mind racing, you’re also watching Whishaw challenging the camera crew to keep up. In Whishaw‘s career-best performance, you can see all the ways that Adam has been beaten down by his job, but you can also see how he thrives on that element of risk. It energizes him. The challenges of working in maternity healthcare aren’t even enough for him; he has to make things harder for himself. He refuses to call in a consultant, even when he’s in over his head. He takes cell phone calls in the delivery room. No multitask is too great for Adam Kay. Living life on the edge is killing him; it’s also what’s fueling him. (Given the chance, late in the series, to do a graveyard shift at a private hospital, he luxuriates in the catered food and the comfortable accommodations and the civilized doctor-to-patient ratio, but at the end of the night, what he can’t do there is save an expectant mother during a problematic birth. And as much as he moans about the soul-crushing nature of the NHS, it’s the birth and death part — the split-second decision making, the risky deliveries in the waiting area or the parking lot outside — that gets him off.) In Whishaw‘s performance, you can see how an untenable situation has become like a drug to Adam. It’s a game to the death that he’s desperate to play. The onscreen Adam Kay isn’t one of those characters who “never allows himself to relax.“ On the contrary, he seems totally at ease in his scenes with his fiancé Harry (Rory Fleck Byrne, as warm and radiant a suitor as any guy could hope for). When they’re out at a restaurant exchanging rings, or just basking in each other‘s company, the worry lines fall off his face, and the natural hollows of his cheeks seem to fill back in. Harry is his escape from what’s out there. But that also means that “what’s out there” has to remain a secret. Why would he want to bring his daily nightmares home? That would mean reliving them 24/7, and he’s already on the verge of doing that. And what if Harry were to judge him for all the ways he’s screwed up? But of course, Harry can’t understand the increasing distance between them, because he can’t begin to fathom the horrors of life as a junior doctor. The very point of the series is: who could? That the relationship is failing is nobody’s fault; the pressures of Adam’s job negate the potential for real intimacy. There’s really only one way that This Is Going to Hurt descends to the routine tropes of television. It offers up Adam’s mother as a harridan of a rich-bitch socialite: forever looking down on her son’s decision to work for the NHS, and not merely uncomfortable talking about his sexuality, but willfully patronizing to his fiancé. And then in the final episode, the script inserts one of those sickly scenes designed to make us reassess our opinion of an awful parent — as scripts so often do, late in the game. (I think the first time I witnessed one of those final-reel reversals was in the film of Butterflies Are Free in 1972; I’ve had 50 years of “here’s why I was such a rotten parent” monologues.) And you know, by that point it really doesn’t matter, because the show has built up such goodwill that you’re willing to forgive it anything. The show has exceeded every expectation you had for it — as a hospital drama, as a character study, as a love story, as an exposé. It’s created something novel in the way it’s refused to be typecast. Like Ben Whishaw, it’s been moving a bit too fast for you to keep up — and you don't mind at all.

1. The Tourist Season 1 (BBC One, HBO Max): The Tourist riffs on a familiar premise: the amnesiac desperate to regain his memory. But that’s about the only thing that seems familiar. The characters feel fresh; the laughs that emerge from this self-described “dark thriller” surprise you. The setting — wide stretches of the Australian Outback — is awesome. And Jamie Dornan works a powerful magic. Dornan is one of a handful of actors right now who has an ability to make an instantaneous connection with his audience. He doesn’t work the viewer over; his tricks aren’t eager and obvious. They’re more oblique. He’s a natural charmer on the screen, even when he’s playing the most despicable of roles. (Part of what gave The Fall its complexity is that the actor who played the serial killer, Dornan, had an easy warmth, while the actor who played his pursuer, Gillian Anderson, was a study in detachment.) Dornan avoids all the pitfalls of playing an amnesiac. He never becomes a cipher; on the contrary, he so reels you in from the start that you’re attuned to every emotion flickering across his face. He doesn’t emerge from his coma without a personality, merely without a memory. He has clear character traits; what you don’t know is if those traits are ones he’s been honing since birth, or ones he’s discovered since awakening. On the surface, The Tourist is about the efforts of Dornan’s character to outrun an enemy he can’t remember. (A Northern Irishman, he was driving through the Outback when a monster truck came barreling towards him and smashed into him. He awoke in the hospital with no idea who he was, who’d want him dead, or even what he was doing in Australia.) But more than that, it’s a series about the presumptions that we as viewers make, about the stories we enjoy and the stars we prize. One wouldn’t say of The Tourist that it always plays fair — on the contrary, a whole lot of tricks are manufactured solely to confound and delight the viewer — but one way it plays scrupulously fair is in letting us make key presumptions because we’re inclined to, or because we want to. It knows exactly how we’re going to respond to the mechanics of the plot — and to Dornan himself — and it lets us run with that. The plot doesn’t trip us up; it lets us trip ourselves up. I’ve rarely seen a series throw so many curves at the viewer without any sense of manipulation. You never feel conned when the writer-creators Harry Williams and Jack Williams flip the script; you’re impressed by their boldness, and you convince yourself that they’ve been playing fair with you, even when they haven’t. You reserve the same goodwill for them that you do for the man at the heart of the story. The Tourist is a show about the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day, so we can move past yet another trauma or heartbreak, or live with the terrible decisions we’ve made. And it’s about the lies we tell ourselves as viewers. That duality is what gives the series its kick — and its complexity — and its audacity. It’s what makes the gut punch at the end so painful. And crucially, The Tourist fortifies our expectations in its crafting of the second lead, Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald). Her character feels fully formed, but she doesn’t feel formed from TV stereotypes. She’s an innocent, just not the kind we’re used to: she’s not overly trusting, and she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She merely has a simple, appealing moral compass, and she follows it. She's put her life on hold to come to Dornan’s aid, because she sees so much good in him — or at least, so much potential for good. And her practicality proves just what he needs. In the series' most enchanting scene, the two of them hole up in a Mexican cantina; he’s holding her hostage, but that’s beside the point. For the moment, they’re just hungry. “I don’t really drink,” she admits, after ordering a dirty martini, “but being held hostage, it didn’t really feel like a water situation.” He stares bewildered at the menu, admitting, “I don’t know what I like.” And she has a readymade reply: “So order everything. Figure it out.” And when he gives her a look of bemusement, she insists, “You’re so obsessed with finding out who you were, why don’t you start trying to find out who you are?” “By trying to find out which kind of Mexican food I prefer?” he replies, to which she counters, “It’s a start.” In the grand scheme of things, her suggestion makes no sense — they have far more important things to deduce than what he likes to eat, like figuring out who’s out to kill them. But at that particular moment, her cockeyed pragmatism seems perfectly sound. They’re kindred spirits: both able to detach themselves from the sense of danger long enough to enjoy the simple pleasures of a burrito. The Tourist bills itself as a dark thriller, but you could also see it as a blood-soaked, corpse-laden romcom about an amnesiac and a former traffic cop. It might be the brightest, cheekiest “dark thriller” I’ve ever seen.

Want more? Check out an essay called "Negotations", in praise of three series that brightened my 2022: Minx, The Ipcress File and Inside Man; an essay called "Men in the Middle," highlighting four recent series that owe much of their success to the onscreen personas of their leading men: The Tourist, This Is Going to Hurt, The Responder and Around the World in 80 Days; an essay entitled "Rough Edges," in praise of two addictive comedies that I discovered in 2021, Back to Life and The Other Two; another entitled "Private Faces," highlighting two spectacular series that emerged in the fall of 2020, Roadkill and Life; and a fifth called "Unwilling Victims," taking a look at three recent series by and about women: The Trial of Christine Keeler, Deadwater Fell and Flesh and Blood. I offer up The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching, Five Foreign TV Dramas You Shouldn't Miss, and my most personal essay, inspired by the death of my puppy Czerny in June of 2021, The 10 Most Comforting TV Episodes About Death.

If you like in-depth looks at hit shows, I delve into Rhoda Season 3, Maude Season 2, Newhart Season 7, One Day at a Time Season 7, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2; serve up my 10 Best Episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Designing Women, WKRP in Cincinnati, Everybody Loves Raymond and Kate & Allie; pen an appreciation of Mike & Molly; and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons. Or if you prefer dramas, check out my write-ups of of Criminal Minds Season 8, Judging Amy Season 6, Voyager Season 4, Doctor Who Series 8, Cold Case Season 4, Gilmore Girls Season 7 (and the subsequent, ill-judged Netflix miniseries), and fourteen essays devoted to all the seasons of the great nighttime soap Knots Landing, starting here. I also look back at Murder, She Wrote and pick out The 10 Best "Murder She Wrote" Mysteries: not (necessarily) the best episodes, but the best whodunnits.