Rank Your 2022 Shows Throughout the Year

[Zorral]

Nobody's watched either The Peripheral or Kindred?

It's puzzling nobody seems to have written on the usual sites about The Peripheral at all, when so many in word-of-mouth, f2f have really liked it.  It also pushed the interest in the book.  In the city's public library system there are lot of copies of The Peripheral, both in print and as E resource access, and they are all checked out, waiting times for them long.

It's definitely in my top 5; Kindred, not so much for many reasons.

[RedEyedGhost]

7 hours ago, Zorral said:

Nobody's watched either The Peripheral or Kindred?

The Peripheral was fantastic.  The lack of mentions of For All Mankind in this thread is disconcerting as well.

[Zorral]

9 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

The Peripheral was fantastic.  The lack of mentions of For All Mankind in this thread is disconcerting as well.

It's hard to know what the actual general feelings are about a lot of shows.  The nearly 100% public slagging of Rings of Power has left me quite confused, as I really liked it -- for what it was, and what I am sure it will become.  It feels as though I had entirely different eyes on it than everyone else who expected LotR or at least Peter Jackson.  It is in my top five too, along with The Last Kingdom.

It also feels as though people are not understanding what the pandemic has done to shows that come out after the 2020, earlier 2021 seasons, which had mostly had their biggest work already done prior to pandemic.  We are currently seeing too, the toll the pandemic and the changes streaming has made in writing for the screen showing up at the same time. There are a lot of things for which I will give a pass in shows at this time for these reasons.  Some like Rings of Power, for a single instance, The Last Kingdom, for another, had to stop and start and stop and start over and over to get these seasons up on the screen.

The breaks in the momentum affected not only the actors and writers, but the viewers too.  Some shows I really liked from pre-pandemic, when they came back, I too could not get back my interest in them. The very elements that had me enjoying them up to pandemic were either missing, or just weren't firing in the post-pandemic circumstance.  And the new stuff, well, as we have discussed elsewhere on this forum, there are serious showrunning and writers room troubles, due to lack of experience and the time to gain it.

 

 

 

[Caligula_K3]

I feel like I've watched a lot of TV this year, much of it very good. I hadn't heard of the Peripheral, so I'm excited to check it out. For All Mankind is definitely on my list of shows to watch too, alongside Station Eleven and Succession. Too much good TV, too little time...

Excellent

1. Severance: This is one of the best first seasons of anything I've seen in a long time. Funny, scary, tense, and thought-provoking all at once, with a lot of fun characters and mysteries.

2. Better Call Saul Season 6: a few pacing issues, mainly related to Gus, but otherwise a phenomenal and emotional end to the series. Like Severance, damn to these writers know how to get every bit of a tension out of a scene.

3. Andor: its first couple of episodes aside, this was fantastic sci-fi, propelled by well-developed and acted characters and an interesting exploration of fascism and rebellion against it.

Very good:

4. Stranger Things Season 4: A really nice return to form for this series. The horror element was welcome, as was the exploration of some of the series' main mysteries. The only downside: the California road trip plotline was a real drag, and most of its characters are uninteresting.

5. Expanse Season 6: What we got was generally excellent, especially given the short episode order, with special kudos to Drummer and Amos. Inaros, though, fizzled out as a villain, and I'm frustrated with some of the choices the writers made in Seasons 5-6, once they knew the show was being cancelled but decided to not wrap anything up, and instead to continue to introduce new plotlines (Laconia) that will never have payoff.

6. Derry Girls season 3: the weakest of the seasons, partially due to COVID and filming constraints. Still a very funny and charming show with a great final episode.

7. We Own This City: Great central performances, beginning, and powerful ending. Gets a little repetitive in the middle.

8. Russian Doll Season 2: Way too convoluted and sometimes boring, but eventually emotionally satisfying.

9. Rings of Power: There were missteps, especially in the Southlands, and there was some bad pacing, especially with Harfoots, but it was a fun and enjoyable first season that, to me, felt like Tolkien. I see a lot of potential for season 2, especially with the dwarves and Adar.

Decent/mediocre:

10. The Last Kingdom: some excellent parts of this final season, and... some very silly parts to this final season. But it was still fun to watch.

11. Wednesday: it's teenage show schlock, it's silly, but it's stylish schlock and it knows it.  It also has a few great performances that bring it to the next level, especially Jenna Ortega as Wednesday.

12. House of the Dragon: it seemed to finally reach some of its potential in the last episode, and there were a few excellent moments (not to mention actors, set design, etc...). Before then, I mainly found it to be a tedious show, stuffed with repetitive exposition, flat characters, and skipping ahead whenever I started to get invested in anything.

13. Discovery Season 4: There were parts of the season that I enjoyed. But I just find the whole show to be too cloying and over-the-top emotionally. Saru is still MVP.

14. Obi-Wan: Meh.

Didn't like/couldn't finish:

15. Mystic Quest season 3: I'll probably return to this, but a few episodes into Season 3 I was ready to give up on it. Like in season 2, it now seems to want to be more of a drama than a comedy show: the characters really aren't equipped for that, and the comedy is more and more diluted.

16. Our Flag Means Death: My #1 disappointment of the year. I love Taiko Watiti, I love pirates, I'm down for a show centred around queer romance. But I can't remember laughing once, and I found the characters and humour to be generally annoying.

 

[Heartofice]

I won't do a full list, I feel like the trends this year are more interesting to me than the individual shows and how I'd rank them.

These were good though:
Severance
Andor
House of the Dragon
White Lotus
Better Call Saul

Overall I feel like 2022 was another year where there is a huge disparity in the quality and amount of tv shows and actual movies. It might because there was just so few movies released this year, but i can maybe count on 2 fingers the number of them I actually really liked. 

Whereas with TV shows there was just so much that I enjoyed. The shows above were great but there were plenty of very good shows like The Boys, Sandman, Peacemaker, The Dropout, His Dark Materials that I really enjoyed watching.

It feels like we are now at a point where the movie industry is permanently on life support. Theatre going is reserved for the 5 MCU and Avatar movies we will get each year and little else, maybe some sort of Top Gun thing. But it does seem like it's only the huge event movies that are going to make a dent and everything else will be sent to streaming. 

Whereas with tv, have we also reached a point where the huge budget shows we've been gifted are coming to an end. All the streaming services seem to be cutting their cloth, and it feels like a lot of the prestige shows meant to draw viewers in don't always perform. Rings of Power seems like a huge dud, but I'm sure Apple and others also had failed attempts to win new viewers.

Then the end of this year saw maybe the death of Fantasy on tv, or certainly what feels like a death spiral. Witcher:Blood origins, Willow, RoP, it seems like there is only so much bland boring, badly made fantasy we can really watch before we lose interest.

Similarly, the MCU streaming shows have all felt like a failure. Nothing ever reached greatness, most of it was marvellously bland and flawed. Rounding it off with She-Hulk, the most jaw droppingly bad and politically moronic show of the year kind of sums it up. Hard to know what they are planning to do next here.

2022 was a weird year, some really really great tv, and some interesting trends for what happens when tv gets bad.

[Mindwalker]

I didn't watch a lot of new shows in 2022 and I'm probably forgetting some.

 

My favorites:

1. Severance

2. Our Flag Means Death

3. Andor

4. Wednesday

 

Also good:

Hacks, Abbott Elementary, Derry Girls (although the final season was weaker)

 

Still watched, but disappointing compared to preceding season(s):

Only Murders In The Building, For All Mankind, Gentleman Jack, Resident Alien, Flight Attendant and probably several more that just slipped my mind.

[Annara Snow]

Rings of Power was among the shows I started and haven't finished, but while for most others it was simply due to the lack of time, ROP was just so boring. I had to force myself to try to focus, and 3 episodes in, basically nothing happened. 

Maybe I should have put it in the "DNF" category just above Boba Fett, but I still haven't officially dropped it and might try to power through, I'm just not in a hurry 

The only thing I liked were the actors playing Aromdir and his human girlfriend (Nazadin Boniadi, who was in Counterpart).

Besides the dull storytelling, they even managed to make most of the elves look so ordinary. Makeup and costuming was so meh. I saw a Facebook post a couple of months ago comparing Aemond from HotD to the smith elf from ROP and saying "one of them looks like a dark elf fantasy from my teenage years, the other one looks like Radovan Karadžić" and now I can't unsee it. 

[Isis]

Shows I hugely enjoyed in 2022:

The Peripheral

Wednesday

Andor

His Dark Materials S3 (not flawless but so many parts were so good that it merits the top grade)

 

Shows I liked in 2022

Yellowjackets

The Expanse final season (was that in 2022?)

Obi-Wan

 

 

1899 

 

Shows that I didn't enjoy much and could have stopped waching

Stranger Things S4 (No more of this for me, thank you)

[Zorral]

The shows that came out in 2022 I most enjoyed watching, some of which are the best of what I watched, but not necessarily. 

Gomorrah, season 5
Reacher
Tokyo Vice
Gentleman Jack, season 2
A Very British Scandal
Candice Renoir, season 4
Hidden Assets
Julia
The Ipcress File
Operation Mincemeat
We Own This City
Dark Winds
Irma Vep
Peaky Blinders, final season
The Split
RRR -- though the not submerged subtext is deeply troubling
Miss S
Sher Shivraj 
MacDonald & Dodds, season 3
Shetland, season 7, final
The Peripheral
Rings of Power
The King's Horseman
Ponniyin Selvan: Part I 
Three Pines