With this craving for content, an inevitable consequence has been an insatiable demand for stories. As a result, literature has found itself in fresh demand: you buy the rights to a hit book, sign up an A-list screenwriter for the adaptation and, ideally, you’ve got yourself an Underground Railroad, a Bridgerton or a Normal People. Next year, look out for small-screen takes on Thomas Perry’s thriller The Old Man (Disney+), Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble (with Jesse Eisenberg), Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends on the BBC, and Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (also BBC). Not to mention the Lee Child adaptation Reacher on Amazon (which, against my expectations, is terrific).
The pool of source material isn’t just limited to books, either. TV has finally wised up to the fact that video games are the ur-texts for the next generation, which is why The Last of Us, an “adaptation” of a much-loved (and excellent) game is one of Netflix’s most anticipated 2022 titles. Paramount+ (one day we’ll all understand what these new channels are, and where on Earth we find them) have Halo, the X-Box franchise, in the works, and Netflix will also be mining the Resident Evil and Tomb Raider dressing-up boxes.
And then there’s real life. Tiger King, The Last Dance, Dopesick, the whole true-crime boom and most recently Get Back have taught us that reality never runs out of content. 2022 will see everything from real-life dramatisations (Netflix’s Inventing Anna, about the “Fake Heiress” Anna Soronkin; the BBC’s Four Lives about the Barking murders; Hulu’s Pam and Tommy with Lily James; The Dropout, Hulu’s Theranos story with Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes) to more epic sports docs (Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty on HBO Max; Amazon’s All Or Nothing: Arsenal) to straight documentary series (Netflix’s The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman). You couldn’t make it up. Which is lucky, because you don’t have to.
Here, though, are my pick of the ten best shows coming our way in 2022…
The Curse (Channel 4)
Eighties-set comedy crime caper from the People Just Do Nothing team following a gang of hopeless small-time crooks who somehow find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest gold heists in history. Add King Gary’s Tom Davis and some of the finest facial hair in recent memory and you have something both distinctive and delightfully daft.
