If there was one artistic medium that I engaged with the most this year, it was television. 2022 was a year with a huge amount of excellent programs. There is far too much good television for any person to see, so there are likely things that I missed. But here are a list of things that I enjoyed, arranged alphabetically:

Andor

Being a Star Wars fan has long involved expecting to be disappointed. For those of us who grew up with the original trilogy and its toys and then encountered the first new canon with the prequels during high school or college are inured to disappointment with any new Star Wars filmed product. Under Disney’s stewardship, nothing has been quite as bad as The Phantom Menace, but the Star Wars brand has not been a guarantee of quality. Rogue One, depicting events that moved right into the main action of Star Wars is perhaps the best of the films. In Andor, Tony Gilroy examines how an oppressive galactic regime can dehumanize (and the equivalent for other galactic species) people and how and why a resistance can form. The human reasons and costs for how the rebellion came to be has never really been explored in Star Wars, and Andor does it with a level of sophistication, nuance, and filmmaking that has never before been seen in this galaxy far, far away. 

(Disney Plus)

Bad Sisters

Somehow, Bad Sisters didn’t seem to have a lot of buzz and aired somewhat under the radar. It’s a murder mystery family dark comedy that invited speculation and conversation. Bad Sisters was funny and tragic and sad and weird all at the same time. 

(Apple TV+)

Barry

Each of the main characters in Barry occupies a very distinct world. Sally’s world overlaps with, but is very different from Gene’s. They occupy a very different reality from Noho Hank. Barry intersects with all of these, and the relationships across these different realities creates humor and drama and tragedy. I have no idea where the show goes after the season finale, which is exciting. 

(HBO)

The Bear

Restaurant kitchens have drama. Anthony Bourdain captured some of that in Kitchen Confidential, but the TV adaption of Kitchen Confidential didn’t translate. The Bear bottles that and also adds in family drama, loss, and emotion. Episode 7 (“Review”), done as a single shot, is one of the tensest and dramatic episodes of television this entire year. 

(Hulu)

The Dropout 

The Dropout TV series may only be the third best telling of the Theranos story, after The Dropout podcast and Bad Blood. It was also by far the best of the business fraud limited series of early 2022 (Uber, WeWork, Anna Delvey), with great performances from Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews. Who knew that 2022 would be the year of the Ebon Moss-Bachrach-aissance? As John Carreyrou in The Dropout, Cousin Richie on The Bear, and Arvel Skeen on Andor, he played distinctive roles in great series.

(Hulu)

Fleischman is in Trouble

When I started putting this list together, I had Fleischman as incomplete — potentially among the best, but wasn’t sure if it would hold together. It has an impeccable cast (including Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, and Lizzy Caplan), and it is narrowcasted to me, telling stories of Jewish New Yorkers (and exiles to suburbia) in their early forties struggling with relationships, class anxiety, and mental health. Until episode 7, we didn’t get any of Rachel’s perspective. I’m not sure if making the last episode almost entirely from Libby’s perspective work, so that Rachel’s story didn’t have further development. 

(Hulu)

For All Mankind

Season 3 of For All Mankind featured some of the most thrilling action sequences of the year, which were tense and stressful because of the life and death stakes. Unlike, say, Glass Onion, FAM created a billionaire space mogul who wasn’t obviously based on any particular real-life billionaire. And yet, this was an uneven season. The Stevens boys were two of the worst characters on television, with motivations that felt more forced than natural. 

(Apple TV+)

Hacks

Jean Smart deserves every accolade she’s earned for playing Deborah Vance.  

(HBO Max)

The Patient

The Patient starts from a ridiculous concept that shouldn’t work, yet it’s taken seriously and realistically. Produced by Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg from The Americans, The Patient uses methodical multi-episode storytelling like Breaking Bad and the Americans to spend a lot of time seeing how the two main characters interact with each other. This is also one of the more interesting Jewish stories that I’ve seen on television on how a divide between Orthodox and liberal family members’ practice can affect their relationships. 

(Hulu)

The Rehearsal

I don’t know if I ultimately liked the Rehearsal after the last episode, but I admire the ridiculousness and audacity of the concept and spending HBO’s money on building an exact replica of the Alligator Lounge. I’m not sure if there’s been anything else that’s asked as directly whether child acting is ethical.

(HBO)

Reservation Dogs

At or near the top of every critic’s best of list this year, Reservation Dogs is a wonderful and distinctive show. It is entirely unique by telling stories of people who television has simply ignored. Simultaneously funny, melancholy, sad, joyful, and cathartic, Reservation Dogs opens up a whole world of storytelling. 

(FX/Hulu)

Severance

If there’s one show that occupied the most space in my brain this year, it is Severance. The production design alone is good enough, even without the ethical questions and the great performances. I’m hoping to get a Music Dance Experience or Waffle Party this quarter. 

(Apple TV+)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks

Lower Decks has been the best Star Trek show in a long time, because it simply recognizes the ridiculousness in Star Trek and embraces it. Lower Decks starts from appreciating and loving Star Trek, taking its storytelling seriously, and finding the humor in it. Strange New Worlds is the best live action Trek in a long time. Unlike the other current Trek shows (Discovery and Picard), SNW remembers that at its best, Star Trek should tell episodic stories about exploration and inclusion, while being fun. Strange New Worlds, while being an unnecessary retread, is so good that it doesn’t matter that it just goes back to Captain Pike’s Enterprise. Anson Mount is a great space dad and Ethan Peck manages to play one of television’s most beloved characters in a way that feels connected to Nimoy, but without feeling like an impression or bad imitation. 

(Paramount Plus)

White Lotus

Television in 2022 is much less of a communal experience than in before today’s Peak TV era of streaming, and many great shows don’t feel like they have as much buzz as they should. The White Lotus, like Succession, is both critically acclaimed and buzzy. This second season had beautiful scenery, great acting, spectacular filmmaking, and plenty of drama. 

(HBO)

What We Do in the Shadows 

Baby Colin Robinson. This show continues to be funny, inventive, and delightful.

(FX/Hulu)

Incompletes

These are two shows that I’d expect to be on my list if I’d watched the episodes that aired this year. 

Better Call Saul

Early on in the pandemic, I got behind on watching season 5 of Better Call Saul because it was heavier and more weighty than I had the mental energy to deal with, and am still just catching up, slowly. 

(AMC)

Atlanta

When Atlanta came back for a third and fourth seasons this year, I started rewatching the series from the beginning and am still just in season 2. 

(FX/Hulu)

 I don’t regret watching, but wanted these to be better:

House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon should be Succession with dragons, and it isn’t. It’s not as much fun as it should be. Yes, the Targaryens were terrible and brutal to each other and everyone else in the Seven Kingdoms, but Game of Thrones had a lot of fun. Bouncing the characters who were fun (Tyrion, Bronn) against the self-serious characters was a huge part of what made Game of Thrones work, when it did. While House of the Dragon did a better job of filling out Martin’s textbook summary into stories than Game of Thrones did with its last couple of season, House of the Dragon didn’t have enough light to balance the dark — and it had that one episode that was entirely dark and looked flat. Where Game of Thrones did it, there was a justifiable story reason. Here, it just felt aggressively unnecessary. 

Reboot

With this cast and creative talent, Reboot was very watchable. But it also never quite clicked. 

She-Hulk

I want to like She-Hulk. Tatiana Maslany is great, the supporting cast is excellent. The concept of law in the Marvel universe should be super-fun. And yet, She-Hulk has a lot of good elements, but they don’t come together into a coherent stew. I don’t know how much of it is the Marvel-ness, but it just needs to be more fun. 

After an interesting and dramatic couple of weeks over at the Tweet factory, I have many thoughts and feelings. Those have evolved from reinforcing my perception that TWTR, the company, was bad at making Twitter the service into a business, to optimistic schadenfreude about Musk being forced to pay TWTR billions of dollars to not own the company, and now nostalgia and sadness after the resignation of seemingly everyone at the company whose immigration status is not tied to their employment.

Note: I will use Twitter to refer to both the service and the ongoing company owned by Elon Musk and TWTR to refer to Twitter, Inc., the public company.

I started using Twitter in March 2007. While I don’t post that much (13 thousand posts in 15 years), I’ve always found it to be the best resource to connect with disparate, but overlapping communities. Twitter hosts conversations involving world-class expertise about every topic imaginable. I use Twitter in multiple communities — subjecting my copyright lawyer followers to privacy law thoughts, and all of them to my TV thoughts, and Mac nerd ideas and Garden Yeti content. I love seeing the overlap between those communities. While Facebook was the platform with the people who you know in real life, Twitter was the platform with the people who you want to know.¹

Twitter entirely supplanted blogging for me. I started posting on my website in the year 2000, which somehow is 22 years ago. And for at least the last 10 Just sharing a link — especially through a Retweet or quote Tweet is often easier and faster. Adding a thought to a stream of consciousness is easy. The character limit encourages brevity. Given the choice of expanding with more detail or analysis, I usually prefer to edit down for simplicity.

Just as I can’t believe that I’ve now used iPhone (15 years) for more than twice as long as I used non-smart cell phones (7 years), I can’t believe that Twitter largely supplanted other personal publishing for this long.

TWTR, the public company, was overall a force for good. While I was often frustrated with their choices that weren’t focused on making the service that I want (a reverse chronological timeline throughwa choice of native clients), under the leadership of Gadde, Twitter was a fierce advocate for freedom of speech around the world. A publisher needs enough scale to be able to control their entire infrastructure to not be subject to risk averse decisions made by service providers. Losing the support of a global-scale service to stand up to anti-speech regulations will likely have a detrimental effect on the freedom of speech under repressive or anti-democratic regimes.

From what I can see, Tweeps built a great culture that made TWTR a good place to work, where smart people could solve large problems and generally try to be a force for good in the world. Working at a smaller², mid-sized tech company, I very easily imagine myself being in the shoes of Twitter employees who are now stuck with the choice of leaving and preserving their work-life balance or keep working at the chaos factory to try to preserve the values that they built into the product.

But, at the same time, a post-Twitter internet might be better. Centralized services controlled by a single company are the antithesis of what makes the internet so magical. Common protocols that allow anyone to publish and develop and build new things are good for creativity and innovation. Replacing a centralized Twitter with a decentralized, federated social network should be, overall, a positive improvement. It can allow for more innovation and communities to adapt tools to their norms faster. That said, Twitter did themselves adopt most of the good ideas that the community developed, like #hashtags, @mentions, retweets, and quote tweets.

After the vast majority of Twitter employees accepted an offer of severance in exchange for resigning, Twitter users have been planning an exit. Mastodon, which seems to me to be a viable replacement for Twitter has seen a huge influx of new users. When I first set up a Mastodon account in 2017, it was a small set of very online, techie users. Since Elno closed his purchase of Twitter, I’ve seen a diverse group of people in multiple different communities join Mastodon and it seems on the verge of being able to replace enough of the value that I get from Twitter. Another nice thing about Twitter is that it’s a general purpose tool that can be used very differently depending on how users find it valuable.

Moving to a decentralized social network pushes the costs out to the edges even faster than the benefits. Mastodon is largely run by volunteers who run community servers, who don’t have a centralized infrastructure team to run a data center and handle incidents, or anything like the scale of ad sales and revenue. I’m looking into running my own host. After graduating college, I realized that I want to own my main email address. I’d like to do that for social presence, too. Hopefully, we will see investment so that it’s easy to get the equivalent of a Gmail or Google Workspace plan for managed Mastodon servers. But, Mastodon is better software today than Twitter was early on. And if it is where many Twitter communities go, the tools will follow. It Tapbots make clients like Tweetbot for Mastodon (Trunkbot? Tuskbot?), I will gladly spend a few dollars a month to control my social presence.

Also, can we have the conversation about whether a billionaire should be able to disrupt a platform that employed thousands of people and enabled millions to communicate? The TWTR board and management did the right thing as a public company to accept Musk’s offer to buy the company. The premium that Musk offered was an amount of shareholder value that exceeded the present value of owning shares of TWTR as an ongoing concern. Parag Agarwal maximized value for TWTR shareholders, which is the obligation of the board. Should corporations codify their mission and values into their charters? What could TWTR have written into their articles of incorporation or bylaws to require the company to value promoting, advocating for, and enabling individual people to speak freely around the world? Can a public company ever maintain those values and have large institutional shareholders?

I am not optimistic about the future of Twitter, in part because I think that Musk does not understand the scale and scope of the platform or trust the people who built it. But, mostly, I am pessimistic because I think that the platform Musk wants is very different than what I want. I do not want an online conservative echo chamber. I do not want to be in a community that allows and encourages hateful speech and does not penalize people who harass others. Effective online communities require forceful moderation to establish and enforce norms of good behavior. Metafilter works so well as a community because of its moderation. Reddit is so variable, because each Subreddit makes its own moderation choices. I remember the Usenet flame wars and have no desire to return to those days. (I don’t remember why rec.skiing.alpine blew up, but I remember that it did).

So, thank you to everyone who worked at TWTR to build Twitter and make it the place where I learned information, connected with my communities and the world, and experienced major world events of the last 15 years. While there’s still a slim³ chance that Twitter survives this era of chaos and doubt, I will be writing more in the Fediverse and here.

Also, if you use Twitter, do export your data in case anything happens to the site. Thanks, GDPR.

Footnotes

1. I do still belong to Facebook, I don’t actively use it regularly, though I do still actively use Instagram, even as I enjoy it less and less as the algorithm pushing Reels takes over the feed.
2. Depending on how many Tweeps chose to leave, we may now have a larger workforce than what remains at Elno’s House of Chaos and Tweets.
3. And growing slimmer every day.

Starting a new occasional and intermittent series, Streaming Services Power Rankings. If I’m paying for all of these services, here’s my take on which are the best use of time and money. This a point in time evaluation and may be updated from time to time: 

1. Hulu – Between FX and Hulu originals, Hulu is on a roll, with The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, Reservation Dogs, and What We Do in the Shadows airing now. 

2. AppleTV+ is the smallest and most curated major streamer. While it doesn’t have much catalog content, they have some of the best-made shows streaming today. Even when they don’t really work, like Foundation, they still look amazing. Most importantly, they just wrapped the third season of For All Mankind. While it took a lot of suspension of disbelief to see Karen, Ed, and Margo as anywhere near the character’s actual age (rather than their actors), space travel keeps many of them in danger at all times.   And maybe they’ll even get baseball right. 

3. HBO Max – On the one hand, the WB/Discovery merger is likely to keep making a mess of the best brand in television. But, despite that, HBO continues to make great television. And even where it isn’t great, it’s usually spectacular, like House of the Dragon. After one episode, House of the Dragon isn’t Game of Thrones at its best or Succession with dragons (which is what it should be.) Also, The Rehearsal! 

4. Netflix – We’re still working through the two-hour episodes of Stranger Things season 4. You know what would be great? If this was a TV show with TV length episodes. Make a TV show or make a movie. Super-long episodes with a normal epidote’s amount of plot and character development is not a good use of anyone’s time. Let’s get the Duffers an editor. Netflix, despite all of their troubles, will continue to rank highly, because Netflix continues to be the best at running a streaming service and having a usable application on every platform. 

5. Linear TV – No, it’s not technically a streaming service, but since I still pay FIOS for TV service, it’s part of the budget, and rand the final season of Better Call Saul! I guess the January 6 Committee comes back next month?

6. Disney Plus – Disney owns some of the best worlds for storytelling. But Star Wars is much less special when there’s too much of it. Nothing that’s followed The Mandalorian has been that good or had anything as cute as a Baby Yoda. Two promising series are likely to raise the Mouse’s position here: She-Hulk and Light and Magic (the in-house documentary about ILM). 

7. Amazon Prime — Prime is a mix of top-tier genre shows (The Boys, The Expanse), but thoroughly competent adaptations of popular airport bookstore series (Bosch, Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan). We’ll see if spending the Bezos Bucks on Middle Earth pays off. The parts of the world that Tolkien didn’t write might be compelling, or it might just be unremarkable fantasy borrowing the trappings of the Lord of the Rings. If it works, expect this 

8. Paramount Plus – Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are among the best Star Trek shows, not because they break any new ground, but because they do the Star Trek adventure of the week format very well. While I’d prefer more original story-telling within the universe, like Lower Decks, the retread of Strange New Worlds works because the cast is so good.  

9. Peacock – Coming down from a month of extra-relevance due to being the home of the Tour de France and Tour De France Femmes, Peacock gets a little love from cycling super-fans for the last grand tour of the year, but most of us can unsubscribe and go back to ignoring Love Island and Office reruns until the next season of Girls5eva or the next Olympics. 

10. Showtime – With Desus and Mero breaking up, is there any reason to subscribe to Showtime until Billions or Yelllowjackets are back?