Written by host of Chatz: A Television Podcast and Scanline Media host Allen Ibrahim.
I have always loved television. Like many children of the 90s, I was often left in front of the TV to while away hours of my youth watching cartoons, game shows, and sitcoms. It never registered with me that TV was an integral part of my life until I met Magellan, my best friend and co-host of Chatz: A Television Podcast. When he left the state for college, we chatted every single week over Skype, and often that conversation would turn towards our own little recaps and discussions of shows we were watching. We eventually decided to do this like a “TV book club” of sorts with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2014 or so, and that was the seed that grew into what Chatz is today.
In 2022, Chatz continued strong with a friendly community of TV nerds, and I never found myself at a lack of shows to watch or people to discuss them with. But I still like to watch things in my own time, especially newer fare since we generally cover older shows on the podcast and I like to check in on the cool, creative directions modern TV is heading. As the resident TV podcaster of the Scanline gang, I felt it was appropriate for my Gimmick Awards list this year to be the shows that came out in 2022 that meant the most to me personally. Also I didn’t play nearly enough games to make a coherent games list, so here we are! Please note: These are in order by first episode release date, not preference.
Technically December 16, 2021, but the last three episodes aired in January of 2022, so I’m including it- Station Eleven
Do you ever watch a show that makes everything that comes out around it seem less interesting by comparison? This was Station Eleven for me, a show based on a novel I haven’t read yet, but I’ve heard is also one of the best of the post-apocalyptic genre. I went into this with a lot of hype, expecting zombies, tragedy, and some pathos at the center. Instead, what I got was a truly unique take on apocalypses. At the show’s core is a love and respect for art of all sorts, but mainly the theatrical. If you want to see Shakespeare performed by mixed gender actors with handmade costumes crafted from household items, you’re in for such a treat.
Its present day storyline follows the members of a traveling Shakespeare troupe who go around the crumbling yet verdant United States. Kirsten, the show’s protagonist, redefines what it means to be a strong woman. Not only is she deadly and hardened when she needs to be, but she also manages to be deeply empathetic as someone who held onto what came before so tightly. Half of the show also focuses on her as a child in the early days of the apocalypse, traveling and then hunkering down with Jeevan Chaudhary, a guy who just can’t say no to a call for help. Their relationship is tested (in ways that often echo The Last of Us, which is currently being adapted into a solid TV series echoing many aspects of Station Eleven) and they grow together while trying to figure out where to go when everyone you know has died.
It’s so hard to sell this show as more than an apocalypse story without going into spoiler territory! Trust me though. In ten episodes, you will cry a lot, you will learn to appreciate Shakespeare, you’ll feel that pit in your stomach when characters get whole episodes focused on their stories like the best episodes of Lost, infamously another favorite of mine. And you’ll come out of it hopeful that we can create something so much greater with the remnants of our society once everything else is gone, trust me.
February 18th- Severance
The Prisoner is by far the best show we have covered on Chatz. Magellan and I both agreed almost the minute we finished the finale that nothing would top it any time soon. And no, I’m not here to tell you the Adam Scott-starring, Ben Stiller-produced Apple TV+ drama Severance does that, but no other show on this list gave me such strong Prisoner vibes as it did. Starting with a mystery: Why are we here in this office? And taking the viewer and characters on a whirlwind journey from there, Severance leaves you feeling so much like the employees of Lumen, who leave behind their real world self to work tirelessly in the underground offices of this company that never even tells them what they’re working on or why.
We start to get hints at this mystery, but so many other ones crop up in the meantime. What happened to Mark’s wife? What does the company’s founder have to do with the titular Severance program? All of these questions wouldn’t work in the slightest if we didn’t care about the characters though, and Severance spends a good amount of its first season making you care. Even characters with no pathos early on are given rich arcs only hinted at in the background, and once the show DOES start giving answers, it doesn’t really slow down. The last three episodes of this were like a multi-stage stress dream that I couldn’t wake up from. There are few shows from this year that I’m anxiously anticipating follow-ups to like I am Severance. When you’re being crushed by capitalism and the metaphor is as obvious as it is here, you can’t help but feel a sort of kinship with these folks just trying to get out.
March 3rd- Our Flag Means Death
I’m not above good, nice queer narratives. I haven’t enjoyed a sitcom in a while, mainly due to the dearth of characters I actually care about and want to see every week. But when I started this series, known colloquially as “the gay pirate show”, I immediately found myself relating profoundly to its protagonist, Stede Bonnet. Rhys Darby plays this dorky gay little dude so well because he WANTS what he can’t have. It’s a basic rule of script writing that a good way to make viewers care about your characters is to give them well-defined wants. Stede is happy with his wife and living situation for a while, but eventually he realizes that adventures on the sea may be the only way to feel alive for him anymore. I’m sure everyone has felt some pull to adventure in their own lives, but to give this storyline to an adult married man, bucking the trend of coming of age stories? To then surround him with a cast of lovable humans whose empathy cracks through their sturdy exteriors? To THEN introduce him to the love of his life and make it MESSY?
Folks, I love messy love stories. All of the queer romance shows I watched this year are bucking some sort of trend in this field. This isn’t a show about gay people dying, nor is it a whimsical and happy tale for children. It’s funny, deeply human, and it pulls you in tightly before breaking your heart. I desperately hope the second season of this show comes out soon and does well, mainly because I want Taika Waititi to be able to do more successful stuff outside of the Marvel grind. You’ll come out of it with favorite characters, favorite lines, favorite episodes. Our Flag Means Death invites you to pore over its characters in that 2010s Tumblr fandom way that I so sorely wish I had done sooner in life. It depicts men in tender, realistic ways without taking away their agency. Gender fluidity, queerness, heteronormativity. These are not themes or ideas I expected to see in a pirate show (though historians have of course learned that they were all extremely present in those times, just left out of the history books for Reasons). God, I gotta rewatch this one soon just to feel something again.
4/22- Heartstopper
I don’t have too much to say about this one because it was a Netflix series I binged in a week for Should You Watch, a Chatz spinoff podcast where we watch an entire season of a new show and recommend people watch it or not. That binge style doesn’t behoove criticism at all, but I will tell you this. Heartstopper will melt your old, jaded heart or die trying. Based on a very saccharine, beloved comic by Alice Oseman, this adaptation casts its young gay lovers in soft pastel lighting, with modern pop songs punctuating their meet cutes, and it finally gives queer kids their Perks of Being A Wallflower (that is, a work that is known much more for how it emulates the FEELING of being a teenager then it does of actually being one). What is most worth shouting out about Heartstopper besides one of the single best needle drops I’ve heard in episode 3, is that it’s about a queer romance that doesn’t end in disaster.
So many stories of young gay love are about tragedy, unrequited love, disease, and heartache. But while you know that Nick and Charlie are going to make it through all of this (the comic has been going for years and just recently hit a hiatus) you still feel invested when they argue or when friends get between them. It never feels overly sappy or unrealistic despite all this, which is truly a testament to the writing. I don’t know…I really like crying, y’all. I cried a lot as a kid and always thought I was broken or weak for it. Now, I actively seek out media to make me cry, and Heartstopper did it multiple times without once threatening its characters lives or their relationship in any serious way. If I have any critique of the series, it’s that they actually added a bit more conflict than the comic had in a spot where it feels genuinely anxiety-inducing. But you can safely watch this series knowing everything ends well, and I wish the best for these two wonderful British kids. Side note: To the fans who basically forced Kit Connor, the actor who plays Nick, to come out publicly? Go watch the dang show you found him in, maybe think about how they might be kinda traumatizing for someone? Maybe. We have a ways to go I guess.
6/23- The Bear
This one really came out of nowhere, huh? With an entire eight episodes dropped at once on Hulu, it seemed like The Bear was another attempt to capture the stress of working as a line cook. These stories are resonating with people now especially because we’ve been cooped up for two years and change due to COVID, and we miss when there were less immediately dire things to fixate on. But don’t take that to mean The Bear isn’t stressful. Quite the opposite! Its first and seventh episodes are pure, unfiltered anxiety over the course of 23 minutes each. You feel cramped, sweaty, rushed, pressured to keep moving like the chefs do as they deal with the worst days of their careers. And while I never worked as a cook in any capacity, I have worked at one of the busiest pharmacies in Massachusetts, and I know what it’s like to blink and watch eight hours of your life disappear to a system that despises you. When you just can’t POSSIBLY keep up, and all you can really do is…not even keep your head above the water, but look at the edge of the water and wish you were a fish.
What I didn’t expect was episodes 2-6 and episode 8, which all explore the other side of an unhealthy relationship to your labor. Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, the main character played flawlessly by Jeremy Allen White, is dealing with an incredibly tragic death in his family. And by “dealing with it”, I of course mean “devoting every last drop of energy and time into his work until his only recourse is to have grief nightmares”. I too have had dreams about work that turned fantastical, but Carmy’s bear dreams reveal something entirely unique to him; this is grief gone wild, quite literally. You will be begging this guy to just go to a meeting, just call his sister, please GOD Carmy get some sleep man. And you know he won’t until he’s facing death. I actually think this show stealth dropping all at once helped it immensely, because if I just had that chaotic first episode to deal with, I would’ve dropped the show like my roommate did when he literally walked out of the room saying “This is way too much” twenty minutes in. But like most shows on this list, circumstances change for the characters, things happen, growth occurs. But we keep cooking.
7/15- The Rehearsal
What a joy it was to watch this series week to week. While I often get annoyed at Twitter discourse and how people will bend over backwards to misunderstand art, I genuinely enjoyed discussing The Rehearsal with friends and family each week. Nathan Fielder took a funny premise (“What if you could rehearse the hardest parts of your life?”) and simply walked with it to its natural conclusion. You’ll laugh, you’ll CERTAINLY wince, you’ll feel deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing and your complicitness in it. But even more so than Fielder’s previous successful work Nathan For You, The Rehearsal has an ending in sight from minute one. You just don’t know where it’s going, and I wouldn’t want to take that adventure away from new viewers who somehow missed all the talk this past summer. Just a warning that like I said, this show gets really…uncomfortable. Not in any like, majorly taboo ways. But in the way where you see two parents in a public parking lot discipline their child and you end up looking even though it’s not your business. Watching The Rehearsal feels like it’s somehow not your business, but you just can’t look away.
9/21- Andor
You already KNOW I couldn’t do a best shows of 2022 list without bringing up the best Star Wars property in years. There isn’t much left to be said about Andor that podcasts like A More Civilized Age haven’t already, so instead I’ll shout out some of the smaller moments that make this series and its radical political themes resonate. There’s people in Star Wars again, and they talk like people! They flirt! They used to date and still want to! They have ideology, you guys! Wait, come back!
This is a Star Wars series with barely enough CG aliens to count on one hand. With so few winks and nods to other movies and shows that you often forget you’re watching a prequel to the movie where all these people die. We get one of TV’s best extended prison break sequences in years. I don’t recall seeing a single lightsaber or Jedi (unless…) And once you get past the new car shine of all these unique elements in the show, it still just rules in its own right. I don’t even think it is particularly a very leftist show as people online have said, though it at least has the guts to directly quote leftist writers and relate their teachings to those of the Rebellion. We don’t need a perfect leftist show. That doesn’t exist, nor is it the main reason Andor is so good. It’s because they brought real people back to Star Wars, and one of them is a stinky mama’s boy with a toxic infatuation that he just can’t quit. And folks? I literally cannot get enough of that.
Be sure to check out Allen on Chatz: A Television Podcast as mentioned, which can be found on their Patreon, their site, and your podcatcher of choice. Also be sure to listen to their work on Scanline Media’s own The Creature Quorum and Oops More Anime!
