TV of 2022

• The Sandman (S1)
• Wednesday (S1)
• Warrior Nun (S2)
• Slow Horses (S1)
• Severance (S1)

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• Dr Who (Specials)
• Motherland Fort Salem (S4)
• First Kill (S1)
• Derry Girls (S3)
• Cracow Monsters (S1 and only?)
• All of us are Dead (S1)
• Killing Eve (S4)
• The Ipcress File (one season special)
• A Discovery of Witches (S3)
• The Witcher (S2)
• Foundation (S1)
• Hot Skull

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• Conversations with Friends (one season special)
• Stranger Things (S4)

This is not an exhaustive list of the TV I watched this year, it’s a list of the TV I was moved to review this year which is not the same. I’m aware of at least a couple of shows I watched all the way through that I didn’t review for various reasons. There are all a number of shows that I started and didn’t finish, which I guess is a review of its own to some extent, but they’re not listed here.

As is usual, this list is not really ranked. While it might be possible to rank Warrior Nun and Wednesday against each other, how do you rank either of those against The Sandman or Slow Horses? However, there is a rough ranking system up there. There are, deliberately, three clusters of shows. First we have the “oh, wow!” cluster, then we have the “great” cluster, then we have the “disappointing” cluster. It’s worth remembering that, although I was disappointed with this cluster, I kept watching throughout and wrote a review - there are series where I stopped watching and series where I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to write a review that are probably lower down on the list than this. Equally, looking back, there are some series I really enjoyed that I didn’t write reviews for, not sure why. They’re not ranked within those groups, not even approximately. They’re chucked up in the order that they appeared, or that I finished them. Hot Skull just made it to this list, although I haven’t finished writing the review yet!

Moving on to look at the tests I apply to the shows, 88.9% passed the Bechdel Test. Both the shows that failed the Bechdel Test were shows with male leads. They were Western shows - although there are Korean, Turkish and Polish shows on this list, the majority are British, Irish and American. While over half of the shows I watch have female leads, and a reasonable number are best described as ensemble shows without a real single lead, that’s still over a quarter with a male lead. So clearly it’s possible to write shows with a male lead and still make your show pass the Bechdel Test. And remember for TV shows that means every episode passes individually, so unlike some films that scrape a pass on one scene, these have at least eight-to-ten. Obviously films with hugely female casts and female leads like Warrior Nun and Motherland Fort Salem tend to have a majority of their scenes passing - but you do get films that do that too, The Woman King most immediately springs to mind, at least of this year’s releases.

For the Ko Test we have two excluded shows (Korean and Turkish language) and 82.4% pass the test.

For the Russo Test 61.1% pass outright. Another 11.0% have a character that passes some stages of the test or is only present for a few episodes. 27.9% have no representation at all.

There is a much higher proportion of TV shows that pass the Russo Test than films (61.1% compared to 43.8% this year). That sort of margin is, sadly, pretty typical over all the years I’ve been doing this. While it might be reflective of biases in what I watch on TV, I think it’s more that film doesn’t do LGBTQIA+, and when it tries it’s all too often a very token effort. That said, while I’m happy to see the effort in TV I feel like I should step back 40+ years and write LG and miss out the rest of the letters, the rest of the Pride flags. Perhaps it reflects what I’m watching, and there is a strong, healthy level of representation out there that I’m missing, but I’m not seeing much in the way of B, T, Q, I, A or + representation. Where are our bi, trans, genderqueer, aro, ace, genderfluid and everything else under the sun characters? (Maybe they’re all crammed into The L Word: Generation Q?

Looking back to last year, we have a rise in the shows that pass the Bechdel Test from 80.8% (this is just outside the limits of a sampling error). For the Ko Test there is a smaller rise from 76% to 82% that is just within the sampling error and for the Russo test there is a fall from 69.2% although this is just within the sampling error. Overall really nothing has changed here which might say something about my viewing habits or the nature of the TV that is provided. (On the day I was writing the bulk of this, there was glee on some sections of the internet as Conservative America reacted in horror to the lesbian kiss in Yellowstone, the cornerstone of their “pure conservative dream” viewing.)

TV shows could still do better but that golden age of TV is alive and kicking still, in oh so many ways. There is far too much TV for anyone to watch, not for anyone to watch and stay sane, simply for anyone to watch physically. While we’ve lost the water-cooler moments that were a thing when I was a child and first an adult, it does mean that we get sufficient TV to suit our tastes and we can just ignore the rest. Is that good? I’m sure there’s a sociologist with a view about the fracturing of society but in terms of our entertainment, it’s great.