The 10 best TV shows of 2022, from I’m a Celebrity and The White Lotus to Bad Sisters

As the year draws to a close, our TV critic Nick Hilton has ranked the top 10 series that have arrived over the past 12 months

From ‘The English’ to ‘The White Lotus’ (Apple, Channel 4, ITV, BBC, Sky)

I’ve watched a lot of TV this year. I wake up in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, and sit down to watch television until my eyes go square in their sockets. It’s a quotidian world of ticking time bombs, raunchy rutting, and liberally littered laughs.

The following 10 shows represent my favourites from the past 12 months. Some were watched for work and some were watched for pleasure, but all were immensely enjoyable. In a year dominated by two blockbuster fantasy shows – HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon and Amazon’s Tolkien epic The Rings of Power – the work I enjoyed most erred on the side of the irreverent. Funny, cynical, moving, thrilling; there’s a little of everything on this list.

But before we get into it, I think it’s important to recognise my biases: competently assembled though many of these shows are, I am never going to feature a Star Wars or Marvel endeavour on a list of my personal favourites. After all, personal taste is what adds flavour to life. And from sci-fi to reality TV, prestige drama to documentary, these 10 shows were mouth-watering additions to the menu in 2022.

10. Stranger Things

Television designed for a teenage audience – and immortalisation in looped videos on TikTok – tends not to be very good. Just look at Wednesday, the slapdash Gen Z-baiting Addams Family origin story racking up monster viewing figures right now. But Stranger Things is not like that. Stranger Things is… good.

Well-written, well-acted, and beautifully mounted in a rural Indiana that feels ripped from the pages of Stephen King or John Irving, Stranger Things’s penultimate season was the best serial killer mystery since the cancellation of Mindhunter. All the more impressive, then, for the fact that it really needn’t have been anything that good.

9. I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

I hadn’t watched a season of I’m a Celeb for many years. Last I knew, it was people like Tony Blackburn and Katie Price in the jungle. But I, like so many of the British public, tuned in this year for one simple reason: I wanted to see Matt Hancock eat bugs.

And, over the course of those few weeks, I became utterly obsessed with the show. There was a sense of catharsis, after the horrors of Covid-19, to see the former health secretary in the pillory, subjected to public retribution for the mistakes of the pandemic. As the weeks wore on, however, it became less about Hancock, and more about the inherent sweetness of Jill Scott and Owen Warner, and the unageing industry of Ant and Dec. Truly, both the show and its presenters are now a British institution.

Matt Hancock showing that politicians are people too on ‘I’m a Celeb’ (James Gourley/ITV/Shutterstock)

8. Bad Sisters

The premise of Apple’s Sharon Horgan-led dark comedy is simple and delicious: four (bad) sisters decide to murder the husband of the remaining, fifth, sister. That undertaking then unravels in increasingly absurd and pitch-black ways, reminiscent of the very best of Ealing comedy slapstick.

Horgan is enormously talented, and assembled a brilliant cast here (Eve Hewson is a revelation as flighty youngest sister Becka, and Claes Bang is chilling as impending cadaver John Paul). The show is by turns a funny, affectionate look at the sibling micro-society, and a much more sober portrait of domestic violence and coercive control. At the final moment, the show fluffs its lines, delivering a fudge of a finale, but otherwise it is a fine piece of new television.

7. Slow Horses

Slow Horses, Apple’s adaptation of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb spy books, has released two seasons in 2022 alone, which is a level of industry not usually correlated with quality. Don’t worry though: Herron is the natural successor to John Le Carré, and Lamb the only heir to George Smiley.

The first season looked at far-right terrorism and radicalisation – it would make a good double-bill with Channel 4’s The Drop-in, which was also very good – and set up a world of exquisite crumminess. Nothing typifies that more than Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb; an Oscar-winning star, farting and belching his way through a spy drama. But the greatest trick that Slow Horses pulls off, is to feel cerebral without being remotely complicated.

6. Louis Theroux: Forbidden America

If you’re not sick to death of the lanky bespectacled presenter, then 2022’s Forbidden America marked a big return to form for Louis Theroux (and is hugely better than his diabolical interview series, where he meets luminaries like Rita Ora and Bear Grylls).

Episodes charted the online success of the far-right, Florida’s violent rap scene, and the changing face of porn, all with customary wit and curiosity. The BBC is a very able maker of documentaries – Frozen Planet II could also have featured on this list, having become a key part of how I hypnotise my brain to sleep – but in the post-Paxman era, they have very few personalities who can carry a show like Theroux. He has swiftly become British factual television’s most important foreign export since David Attenborough.

Theroux’s latest documentary investigates Florida’s violent rap scene (BBC)

5. The English

With its rather portentous opening monologue, I fully expected to find Hugo Blick’s six-part western, The English, altogether too serious. What a pleasure, then, to discover that this series – led by superb performances from Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer – is, in fact, a picaresque romp through the blood-soaked plains of pioneer-era America.

The ravishingly beautiful show (surely one of the best-looking things the BBC has ever broadcast) feels like the Coen Brothers adapting a Cormac McCarthy novel – which is one hell of a compliment, in my opinion. Sadly, the ending was somewhat rushed, but that shouldn’t undermine the excellent work that had come before.

4. Severance

It’s been several years since I last worked full-time in an office – thank God – and, since then, a large chunk of the workforce has joined my life of remote luxury. Severance is a show that ought to convince the remaining holdouts to quit their tiny, cubicled, lives.

Apple’s office dystopia – set in the world of the “severed”, who have detached their work selves from their home selves – has been the platform’s critical homerun of 2022. But the plaudits are richly deserved. The show is by turns both bleakly comic and devastating in its depictions of grief, trauma and the extent to which we all fail to compartmentalise. After that cliffhanger finale, its return for a second series will be among the most anticipated TV events of coming years.

Dodgy business: the cast of ‘Severance’ (Apple TV+)

3. Derry Girls

Lisa McGee’s coming-of-age sitcom, set in 1990s Northern Ireland, had already made stars of its actors and creator before the final episodes aired in the spring. But the show’s swansong cemented its reputation (even Martin Scorsese is watching along) as the best British comedy of recent years.

Anchored by the genius of performances like Saoirse-Monica Jackson’s Erin, Nicola Coughlan’s Clare, and Kathy Kiera Clarke’s Aunt Sarah, Derry Girls is one of the few shows that never fails as a recommendation. Everyone, from elderly relatives to the bloke who sits behind me at the football, gets a chuckle out of the shenanigans of the gang. The absence of one of the UK’s few truly laugh-out-loud comedies will leave a big hole in Channel 4’s comedy programming.

2. The Rehearsal

Whether you enjoy The Rehearsal or not will rely, entirely, upon your willingness to go with its flow. The premise is simple: Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder finds people who have a small but emotionally heavy challenge weighing upon them. Fielder then uses the art of the rehearsal to coach them through the eventual moment when they must confront this issue. Simple.

But that is seriously underselling the show, which is one of the most ambitious, uncategorisable things on television. The first episode, for example, requires the construction of the perfect facsimile of a New York bar, in a giant rural hangar. The absurdist grandeur of the undertaking – rather like Tom McCarthy’s novel, Remainder – is played beautifully against tiny beats of emotional nuance. Anxiety inducing, upsetting, and very funny, The Rehearsal is extraordinary television.

Special Mentions

There has been some great stuff on British television this year that often gets overlooked (by me) in favour of sparkly American content. Somewhere Boy, on Channel 4, was unusually affectionate and beautifully performed, while Everything I Know About Love was lively, raunchy and only mildly infuriating. Sherwood, meanwhile, was one of the few pieces of original drama that was a real, unequivocal success. And the return of Industry’s horny bankers filled the year’s Succession-shaped hole.

On a more global level, I thought the second chapter of Russian Doll was every bit as inventive as the first season, while, similarly, the second outing of Only Murders in the Building somehow managed to avoid losing the spark that made the show great.

And an early draft of this list had the FIFA World Cup in a medal position, because, frankly, nothing on TV has matched it for sheer drama. You can blame its absence on a certain Olivier Giroud.

1. The White Lotus

I loved the first series of The White Lotus, which came seemingly out of nowhere and managed to be funny, sexy and utterly nerve-shredding. The second season is largely just a tonal sibling (only Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya, and her husband Greg, make the trip from Hawaii to Sicily) and yet it impeccably manages to transplant the spirit of the sandy Pacific to the wine-drenched shores of the Ionian.

Jennifer Coolidge in ‘The White Lotus’ (Sky)

The new cast – including Aubrey Plaza, F Murray Abraham and Tom Hollander – are aided by Mike White’s wildly inventive and funny scripts. The ability to capture the zeitgeist without it feeling self-conscious is an underrated skill, but it’s a department in which The White Lotus excels. Skewering the narcissistic myopia of Gen Z, millennials and baby boomers in one fell swoop, The White Lotus: Sicily (as I note it’s being styled for the Golden Globe nominations) was the most fun I had in front of a TV screen this year.

By the time the finale was released earlier in December, it felt like all the world was watching. Far more than dragons or magic rings, this has been the real event television sensation of 2022.