Ranking Every TV Show of 2022: #s 95-81

We’re ranking every TV show of 2022. If you missed the first episode (har har), you can find it here.

95. Los Espookys (HBO, Season 2; 2019 rank: 72 of 101). I feel bad about not enjoying this show. It’s commendably offbeat, and its premise—four friends run a guerrilla business where they use their amateur talents to manufacture supernatural happenings as suits the bizarre needs of their eclectic clientele—is a triumph of bizarre imagination. But the execution is spotty, and some of the oddities are so random that they verge on perverse. (Also, I know he’s a co-creator, but Fred Armisen is absolutely dreadful.) I admire the concept of Los Espookys, because in an artistic landscape glutted with the same old stuff—true-crime dramas, ensemble sitcoms, world-building fantasies—we need more unclassifiable programs. I just need them to be better.

94. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon, Season 1). What was I just saying about more of the same? For the past several years, streamers have been desperate to create their own “next Game of Thrones,” and Amazon’s fantasy powerhouse comes preinstalled with its own rabid fan base. It certainly looks the part; the weaponry is finely ornamented, the special effects are casually eye-popping, and the landscapes glitter with exoticism. So why is it so damn boring? Amazon purportedly has five seasons planned for The Rings of Power, and it shows, because this inaugural batch of episodes feels like an extended pilot for the material yet to come; it isn’t until the finale where I thought to myself, “Ah, cool, I’m interested to see where this goes.” Morfydd Clark is an undeniable presence (check out Saint Maud… if you dare!), and I’ll watch Nazanin Boniadi in anything, but currently The Rings of Power is too concerned with activating the lumbering machinery of its plot to deliver material that’s genuinely propulsive. One does not simply buy the rights to a story and automatically make it entertaining.

93. Dark Winds (AMC, Season 1). Zahn McClarnon has been a terrific character actor for years—his slippery presence has enlivened (among other things) Westworld, Fargo, and Reservation Dogs—so it’s gratifying to see him headline a prestige crime drama (with George R.R. Martin executive producing!). But despite a welcoming geographic specificity (the series is set on a Navajo reservation in the 1970s), Dark Winds struggles to live up to its pulpy promise. It incorporates the building blocks of a classical whodunit—dead bodies, remote lairs, bags full of money—but it fails to assemble them with ingenuity or élan. (It also wastes Noah Emmerich, something I didn’t realize was possible.) I’m pleased it exists; I’m annoyed it doesn’t do more.

92. Moon Knight (Disney, Season 1). The first episode of Moon Knight—starring Oscar Isaac as, well, it isn’t entirely clear—courses with excitement and discovery. At last, a Marvel show that’s weird, creative, and fun! So it’s a real bummer when that opener turns out to be a feint, and that the rest of Moon Knight progresses as Indiana Jones lite. There’s one more invigorating hour mixed into the batch, but the series’ strong moments only underscore its wasted potential. You have a lead as inherently watchable as Isaac, and you deploy him for the usual weightless CGI green-screen nonsense? You land Ethan Hawke as your villain, then turn him into every other tedious megalomaniac? This, I suppose, is the Disney touch: taking intriguing material and depriving it of anything that might risk possessing an authorial personality. More like moon blight.

91. Better Things (FX, Season 5; 2020 rank: 91 of 124). I’m sorry. It’s just not for me.

90. Somebody Somewhere (HBO, Season 1). Ibid. Though honestly, I admire the gentleness of this series, which follows a woman (Bridget Everett) returning home to Kansas after her sister dies and clashing with the remaining members of her family. It’s deeply heartfelt and sneakily progressive (hey, trans people exist in the Midwest too!), and Everett has a few scenes where she sings and just blows the doors off. But the style is so reserved it borders on tentative, and there are some weird plot points that bump up ungracefully against the show’s more restrained tone. That arrhythmia is arguably how life works, and Somebody Somewhere is certainly steeped in the strange tempos of its characters’ existence. But the fact remains that after I started it, it sat in my “Up Next” queue for about 10 months, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

89. The Midnight Club (Netflix, Season 1). In contrast, I finished this one pretty quickly, and it’s probably worse? Spearheaded by Mike Flanagan—Netflix’s horror laureate who previously helmed The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass (all of which earned spots on the top 10 of this online publication)—it follows a group of terminally ill teenagers who tell each other scary stories as they wait at death’s door. If the premise sounds a little young-adulty, it is; the show is based on a Christopher Pike novel, and the characters and relationships on display are more archetypal than fully realized. Still, there’s some legitimate flair on display here; the individualized structure allows most of the episodes to adopt a show-within-a-show approach, and there’s playful variation in tone—a science-fiction thriller, a hard-boiled noir, a serial-killer procedural—that gives each installment its own flavor. Unfortunately, the overarching story is muddled (Midnight Mass’ Samantha Sloyan has a small role, and no points for guessing whether she’s naughty or nice), and the more The Midnight Club focuses on its central mystery, the less interesting it becomes. Maybe that’s fitting for a series about a group of teenagers who live largely dreary lives, only to discover some isolated moments of peace in the black of night.

88. Shantaram (Apple, Season 1). The word “need” is overused in armchair critical circles. Did this show need to exist? No, dummy, because no work of art needs to exist. With that in mind: Did Shantaram really need to run for 12 fucking episodes? This is the epitome of the insufferable “We aren’t making a TV show, we’re really making a 12-hour movie” rhetoric; it just goes on and on, with random flashbacks, incremental plot developments, and a deplorable voiceover that feels like a negative excerpt from a “show, don’t tell” screenwriting class. It’s a shame, because on a micro level, much of Shantaram is pretty good; Charlie Hunnam is a charismatic lead, Alexander Siddig is an impressively enigmatic antagonist, and Shubham Saraf is positively delightful as the series’ local guide and moral conscience. (Also, hello Elektra Kilbey.) There are probing questions about criminal justice, personal redemption, and white saviorism. It’s just long, without any episodic structure to give it teeth. In the ’90s, it would’ve been a movie; 30 years from now, it’ll probably be remade for TikTok.

87. The Umbrella Academy (Netflix, Season 3; 2020 rank: 59). Shows that play with time carry with them the opportunity for reinvention; unencumbered by the laws of continuity, they can rescramble themselves as they see fit. Early on, the latest season of The Umbrella Academy hints toward capitalizing on this possibility, taking place in an alternate universe (or something) where the titular school has somehow duplicated itself, resulting in rival superhero academies. But despite that initial intrigue, the show doesn’t do much with its newfound freedom. The characters are still reasonably fun to be around (Elliot Page’s transition is handled with the appropriate lack of fuss), and there are still enough quirky stylistic flourishes to keep things interesting from scene to scene. But the master plot—surprise, there’s yet another apocalypse to be averted—is so perfunctory, even the series itself doesn’t seem to care about it. That’s arguably transgressive, but The Umbrella Academy is too cautious to take real risks with its storytelling. At some point, it needs to let the rain fall and play around in the mud.

86. The Time Traveler’s Wife (HBO, Season 1). It isn’t boring. I don’t think that this series, based on Audrey Niffenegger’s novel (and previously adapted into a film starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana), is remotely credible in any traditional sense—not its characters’ behaviors or desires, not its pretzel-shaped structure, and certainly not its plotting. But man is this thing thoroughly, watchably crazy. I don’t mean that in the “so bad it’s good” sense; I just mean that stuff happens, and it’s impossible to turn away. There’s literally a scene of Theo James giving a blowjob to Theo James, and in a era full of forgettably competent TV, that’s the kind of moment that sticks in your memory. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a huge swing, and even if it’s a swing and a miss, it still generates a rush of wind from its sheer exertion. In case you haven’t noticed, I watch a lot of TV, to the point where I often forget when different shows have dropped a new episode, but I didn’t once neglect to watch each new hour of this as soon as it dropped. That has to mean something. Whether the series itself means anything is less clear.

85. Super Pumped (Showtime, Season 1). 2022 was a great year for docudramas about tech gurus, in terms of quantity if not quality. Super Pumped, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt as the founder of Uber, is a perfectly competent member of the species, featuring a strong cast, brisk pacing, and some thoughtful insights on America’s capitalistic culture (along with its boys’ club attitude). It’s also weirdly bland, so confident that it’s telling an interesting fact-based story that it doesn’t bother to invest it with any dramatic urgency. Sure, hiring Quentin Tarantino to do your voiceover might help your street cred, but it doesn’t change that he’s still info-dumping like any other narrator. I suspect that if Super Pumped had come out even five years ago, it would have felt more significant. As it stands, it feels like just another fall-from-grace tale, and as Gordon Levitt’s CEO comes to understand, there’s always robust competition for the next big thing.

84. This Is Us (NBC, Season 6; last year: 65 of 108). Bless it, it never changed. You might think that, armed with the foreknowledge that it was entering its last season, This Is Us would have departed from the formula it had spent half a decade honing. Instead, the final go-round supplies the same, only more so: tear-jerking monologues, earnest familial squabbles and reconciliations, narrow episodes that startle in their laser focus alternating with sprawling hours which feebly attempt to connect all of the many, many characters to the same painfully obvious theme. I shouldn’t be surprised, because this durable pattern is what made the show so successful in the first place. This is This Is Us.

83. Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney, Season 1). As a skeptic of mercenary franchise-churning, I was skeptical of this series; as an unapologetic prequel-lover, I was excited to see Ewan McGregor slip back into his Jedi robes. Turns out, both my skepticism and my excitement were unwarranted, because this Obi-wan Kenobi is perfectly fine. It looks great, it veers away from Tatooine (at least for awhile) in favor of more exotic locales, and it tells a satisfying story without indulging in too much fan service. And yet, it doesn’t inspire any real wonder—the kind of wide-eyed amazement that the Star Wars movies delivered in my childhood and (occasionally, yes) adulthood. Its competence is weirdly dispiriting, suggesting that this is the best a Star Wars series can possibly be. Turns out that isn’t the case, but for more on that, you’ll need to check back later this week. (See, a cliffhanger! Take that, Disney, I can spurn self-contained episodes too!)

82. Reacher (Amazon, Season 1). I like Tom Cruise, and I’ve never read the Lee Child books, so I wasn’t especially perturbed by the diminutive actor playing Child’s gigantic brawler for two feature films. That said, it’s impossible to deny the beefy appeal of Alan Ritchson, who evinces the character’s innate power simply by looking the part. He also embodies the old-fashioned charms of this new procedural, which is thoroughly, aggressively functional. Corrupt small-town cops, evil businessmen, hot babes, cagey old war buddies, mistrustful supervisors who grudgingly come to respect our hero’s “results at all costs” philosophy—it’s all here. (So are some putrid flashbacks, which are almost impressive in their irrelevance.) You’ve seen all of this before, but it’s executed here with a certain no-frills rigor that feels suited for the material. It’s not fancy, but it gets results.

81. The Flight Attendant (HBO, Season 2; 2020 rank: 43). As I alluded to when discussing This Is Us, I’m fond of quoting the line from Casablanca where Humphrey Bogart describes Claude Rains as “like any other man, only more so.” That’s generally the rule of sequels and follow-ups: Maintain what made you popular the first time around, only load up on those same qualities as much as possible. So it’s odd that the second season of The Flight Attendant feels like the same as the first, only less. The comedy is less sharp, the mystery less tantalizing, the tension less taut. There’s still plenty to like: Kaley Cuoco is inherently appealing, Zosia Mamet deserves her own show, and there are some fun guest spots (Mae Martin! Sharon Stone!). But the spark of originality that animated the first season is less lively this time around, and while the show was always pastiche, the plotting now feels secondhand. It’s still enjoyable; it just no longer takes you up in the air.

Coming tomorrow: bad boys, ball-playing girls, old mobsters, and young teachers.