5 Favorite Episodes: 2022

It’s time for my longest-standing End of Year tradition: highlighting my favorite episodes of the year.

Film is an in-and-out trip, while TV stays in our lives for day-long bingethons, weeks, and years as seasons stretch on. Episodes are the smallest unit of TV, and at their best they tell stories that are both individual and part of a grander narrative. They’re like great soccer players, you can appreciate their singular greatness but only in the context of a team setting.

So every year I make a list of my 5 favorites (here’s 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 if you’re a Skip Intro completist I guess). The only rule: each show can only have one entry. Before we get into the countdown, here are some honorable mentions:

• “Starting Now” — Barry
• “Pine Barrens” — What We Do in the Shadows
• “Good News About Hell” — Severance
• “Roofing” — Reservation Dogs
• “Stranger in a Strange Land” — For All Mankind

#5. “We Are Not Alone” — Better Things (FX/Hulu)

There are some shows or films or pieces of art that want to say something. They work with a theme or in a space that allows them to explore an idea from multiple angles, and to tell you a story about it.

And then there are other shows that just want to watch with curious eyes. They’re about looking at our world with curious eyes.

Better Things is a show that defies analysis. It doesn’t have much in the way of plot or stakes compared to most TV shows. There isn’t always a resolution to its conflicts. What it does, though, is very, very special: it lives.

Since it first aired in 2016, we’ve watched this family grow up before our very eyes, and between that and the show’s handheld camerawork and vlog-like editing, the sense that this is a lived-in world has grown every season.

As is true with every single episode of Better Things, the musical choices in this episode are perfect songs you’ve never heard. In that sense, it’s fitting that creator Pamela Adlon decided to start the episode with a tribute to this sneaky amazing music video. More than any show I can think of, it embodies emotional intelligence and compassion, always looking at things with curious and charitable eyes, so it makes sense that she would use her final episode to shout out something she clearly found online that resonated with her.

This show was never about announcing itself, it was always about sharing. It shared its optimism, its empathy, its creativity, and its perspective of life. Sam Fox never met a person she couldn’t try to be friends with, and that’s because she treated the world the same way Better Things did. She is a really good person, with a way of bringing people together and making them feel good. And, I don’t know, I like it.

#4. “The Theater and Its Double” — Euphoria (HBO)

No episode of TV this year was as impressive in its combination of filmmaking and self-aware commentary than Euphoria’s penultimate episode. Taking place almost entirely within the autobiographical play produced by Lexi Howard, toggling between theatrical reenactments of events from before and during the show’s run, the actual memories of those events, and the audience’s reaction to seeing themselves on stage for all to see.

It’s a dizzying amount of story, characters, and perspectives to keep straight—a high level of difficulty that Sam Levinson absolutely pulls off, his camera whizzing through space and time with a momentum that mirrors the nervous energy of Lexi and her crew. This play is not going to go off without controversy, it takes aim squarely at its audience, and everyone knows it.

It’s a bold production, not just because it clearly has more budget than any high school play ever could, but because it's unflinching in its criticisms of the real-life people it targets. The theatrical flourishes of the play are an added bonus of filmmaking, a work of art in its own right, existing within this singular episode of TV.

But what elevates this episode is the way it doesn’t just confront its high school audience with a brutal and triggering dramatization, but that it’s using this episode to confront Euphoria’s audience the same way. It touches on the criticisms the show has received in real life, from its sexualization of characters who are canonically minors to the dangers of its glorification of drug use, by doing the same thing in the play itself and watching the harm it causes.

Euphoria isn’t apologizing for who or what it is, but it is acutely self-aware in this episode, a Russian nesting doll of commentary and filmmaking.

#3. “It Was All a Dream” — Atlanta (FX/Hulu)

Atlanta completely redefined what was possible in TV during its run. The last two times it was eligible for this list, it put an episode in the Top 5, both times for truly surreal and mind bending episodes: “B.A.N.” and “Teddy Perkins.” Atlanta always avoided giving its audience exactly what it wanted, instead choosing to challenge them in both its stories and narrative structures. I mean, the third season didn’t even take place with our main characters in the titular Atlanta!

With all that in mind, Atlanta’s finale “It Was All A Dream” is a perfect ending to the show, one that rejects everything you thought you might know about it. From leaving the black-owned sushi restaurant to get Pop-Eyes to inexplicably passing a sobriety test only to steal a cop’s gun, Atlanta continued to subvert expectations.

At times, this made the show frustrating for audiences—the loglines of each episode would imply that the show was aware and actively courting this kind of anti-climax—but the disorienting and surreal feeling it fostered is undeniable.

“It Was All A Dream” captures all of this perfectly, revealing multiple layers of Darius’s Inception-style dreams, before crashing one of those dreams directly into the “reality” the other characters are living. What is reality? Is Darius dreaming? Is Judge Judy thicc?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The point is to completely erase the line between reality and surreality, to artistically represent the experience of life in America.

#2. “Saul Gone” — Better Call Saul (AMC)

The ending of Better Call Saul was never really in question. We knew where Saul ended up at the end of Breaking Bad, we knew which characters would survive the show, and largely who would not. So what was left for the show to accomplish in its finale? Plot-wise, not much.

But to focus on the twists and turns of the plot would be to misunderstand what made Better Call Saul so great: the relationship between Jimmy and Kim.

For the length of the series, they served as balancing forces in each other’s lives. Jimmy brought excitement but also danger, Kim brought a conscience and stability. From the first moment of the show, it has been clear that while Jimmy doesn’t care what anybody thinks, he does care what Kim thinks, and so the only true unanswered question the finale had to answer was how he would be judged by his chosen jury.

While Jimmy easily proves his ability to weasel out of this situation and skate by on minimal charges, it’s Kim’s presence that drives his decision to come clean. It’s about protecting Kim from legal damage, but more than that, it’s about being someone Kim can be proud of, because she’s the one person he could never fool.

What makes this episode so great is not just the way it perfectly bookends the series—complete with mirrored shots from the pilot—but because of the way it bookends the genre. Whereas Breaking Bad was a happy ending where Walt got pretty much everything he ever could have asked for, Jimmy ends Better Call Saul behind bars, willingly. Like so many Difficult Men before him, from Dexter Morgan to Vic Mackey to Walter White to Tony Soprano, he found himself in over his head.

But where they all leaned into their worst impulses, burning all humanity along the way, it was the lawyer—of all people—who held onto his.

#1. “Review” — The Bear (FX/Hulu)

The Bear was a show that came out of absolute nowhere, a whirling dervish of snappy acting, even snappier editing, and a tangible sense of stress that anyone who has worked in food service knows all too well. No episode summed the entire experience that is this show more than the near-episode length oner it dropped in its penultimate episode “Review.”

Set in a sandwich shop in Chicago, the episode begins with a glowing review that should be vindicating for the restaurant, except that the dish highlighted in the review isn’t on their menu. There’s a bit of jostling between Carmy and Sydney, as he sees that dish as undermining, before the whole kitchen explodes in order tickets as we find out the to-go service was left on all night.

At this point, we’ve been wandering around the shop through the eyes of the camera for about 10 episodes uninterrupted, observing a living, breathing organism—the way each character talks to others and the small space they all cramp into—before throwing in a virus and watching that organism be stress tested.

Carmy loses his cool, Sydney accidentally stabs Richie, and Marcus straight-up quits, all while the tickets continue to pile up and the camera refuses to cut. It’s immersive, in a way that cuts both ways, letting us be comfortable in a space before trapping us there, unable to do anything but watch the trainwreck unfold.