The 30 best TV shows of 2022

If you haven’t gotten the message yet after reading my colleagues’ ever-so-thoughtful writeups, 2022 was pretty damn stacked with great TV shows. (In fact, narrowing this thing down to just 30 series proved quite a chore.) But as we compiled titles and shuffled the order for this list over the last few weeks, didn’t budge from its top spot. Is it because it’s clearly the best, untouchable by those lowly series below it? No, of course not. Or because it was such a delightful surprise to see something without stars or ties to a franchise or a big budget or well-known creators or pre-premiere buzz become that show that everyone we know suddenly talked about over the summer? Yes, sure, but that’s only a small part of it. It’s more that Christopher Storer’s Chicago Italian beef joint-set series, not unlike chef-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown Carm (Jeremy Allen White), goes for it—and in the process, cooks up something more ambitious, original, deep, funny, and visually striking than it needs to be, with characters I genuinely care about and want to spend time with (yes, even Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s foul-mouthed, capital C Chicago-accented Richy). It’s the kind of show, in other words, I want to see more of in 2023—or, put another way, it’s kind of like that unassuming sandwich that turned out to be the best, most memorable meal you ate all year. [Tim Lowery]