Top Ten TV Series of 2022 (so far)

If you haven’t yet, check out my Top Ten Movies of 2022 (so far)!

This is another list that I intended to do at the mid-year point, but again, due to shifting schedules and the general chaos of life, it’s now an August event. There are some series that are either currently airing or have just completed (looking at you, Only Murders in the Building) that will almost certainly appear on my list by the year’s end, but for now, I’ll focus on series that have completed on or before the week of August 15. And with that, enjoy my top ten television series of the year thus far!

Image courtesy of Netflix

“The Umbrella Academy” Season Two Review: The Seven Stages of Fun

Note: This review was originally published in The Cape Cod Chronicle in August 2020.

by Rowan Wood

Time travel is a tricky business, that arrives, much like the heroes in the latest season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, with a whole host of questions: how do you avoid cliché time travel pitfalls? How can these characters grow and evolve, beyond their first-season selves? Most of all, how do you keep things original, and unique to the world you’ve created?

Thankfully, Netflix’s big-budget, ten-episode format is the perfect medium to tell the story that the show needed to tell. After the massive cliffhanger of the first season, the superpowered Hargreeves siblings are stranded at different points in the early 1960s, and must reunite to stop a world-ending apocalypse on November 25, 1963.

“The Umbrella Academy” Season One Review: Addictive, Fantastical Hero Drama

Weird is the new norm for television. And while the first season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy is certainly not as outlandish and far-reaching as the comic series it’s based on, it certainly (rather gleefully) buys into the strangeness that the world offers.

Set contemporarily (though the timeline is ambiguous, and full of anachronisms), the superbly styled first season picks up thirty years after a number of women around the world mysteriously gave birth, despite having never been pregnant in the first place. Eccentric billionaire Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) manages to purchase seven of the children, and he raises them to be a profitable team of superheroes (given that, aside from one of them, the children all have extraordinary abilities).