2022 on the Small Screen

Happy New Year, everyone. It's after 9am on Sunday in Japan so it's already well into 2023 here. Normally around this time I make a list, ranking all the movies I saw in the preceding year. But as television has become a more and more prominent medium, I'm going to do two lists now and I'll start to-day with my television list. To-morrow I'll post my movie list.

This is a ranking of all TV shows I saw in 2022, excluding shows I only watched the first episode of (Interview with the Vampire, Severance). I included shows that concluded in 2022, so I'm not counting Willow, which will count for 2023, and I am counting The Book of Boba Fett, which started in 2021 but concluded in 2022. I'm also not including specials--the Doctor Who specials, the two Marvel specials. But that still leaves me with a list of 19 shows! I watched 19 TV shows last year! Good grief.

Anyway, here we go.

19. The Rings of Power, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Is it fair to call it the worst show I saw last year, when it had such expensive visuals? Yeah. The writing was that bad.

18. Tales of the Jedi (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Dave Filoni squeezes most of the life out of some of our favourite Jedi, giving us some backstories that reveal Count Dooku and Ahsoka Tano are duller than we as yet suspected.

17. Ms. Marvel, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The first couple episodes are pretty cute and engaging and Iman Vellani has real charm as the protagonist. But then it all rapidly spiralled into a dull mess and Vellani's performance mysteriously became somnambulent, as though she knew this was crap.

16. Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Ewan McGregor and Andrew Stanton managed to drag this show out of the morass of notoriously bad writing to give us a few decent moments.

15. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

In a pattern everyone is becoming familiar with, this show had a pretty good first couple episodes followed by astonishingly bad ones written by inexperienced or plain talentless hack writers. This one had a few other good points, including a memorable appearance by Daredevil, but it completely choked with its arrogant, tone deaf finale.

14. Wednesday, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Jenna Ortega, Tim Burton, and Danny Elfman work some real magic, managing to bring some quality to a show with average quality writing.

13. Kimetsu no Yaiba season 2 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

It's nice to catch up with these great characters but the makers of this show made two big mistakes--they rehashed the movie in the first half of the season and, in the second half, extended a bloody battle sequence across several episodes, stretching the story well past its capacity to hold the viewers' interest. They were two mysterious choices for a show based on a lengthy manga with presumably plenty of story at hand to fill a season.

12. The Expanse season 6 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

It used to be one of the best shows on television but, sadly, its final season was made ridiculous and incoherent by external politics. Still, it had enough of its old self lingering on to make one or two aspects worth watching.

11. Moon Knight season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Oscar Isaac delivers a magnificent performance in a show that, at its best, wove a good supernatural adventure tale mixed with psychological hallucination.

10. Spy x Family season 1 (Wikipedia entry)

The latest anime to take Japan by storm, this one is an excellent outlet for the country's famous fetish for Western aesthetics while also offering a sly commentary on the modern Japanese family dynamic.

9. Only Murders in the Building season 2 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez continue to be a magnetic combination and this season's roster of guest stars were certainly memorable. Shirley MacLaine in two appearances showed she still possesses the extraordinary instincts of a real movie star.

8. The Book of Boba Fett season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The writing went off the rails at points but Boba's life among the Sandpeople was an engrossing story. Robert Rodriguez pulled off some good action sequences, some highlights being Boba's encounter with a sand monste in the first episode and his showdown with Cad Bane.

7. Stranger Things season 4 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Some disappointing retconning of the superior earlier seasons and a waste of several characters couldn't totally detract from this show's positive qualities. New character Eddie Munson was another all too brief hit for the show and the memorable use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" justly brought that song back to mainstream popularity.

6. The Orville season 3 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The third and possibly final season of The Orville is its most visually spectacular and its most tightly written. Some of the political pandering became a little tiresome but, at other times, the show was as thought provoking as the '90s Star Trek series that inspired it.

5. House of the Dragon season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Giving us back some of that sweet, sweet fantasy soap opera we knew and loved on Game of Thrones before Benioff and Weiss wrecked it, House of the Dragon was an absolute pleasure from week to week.

4. The Sandman season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The deviations from the source material diminished this show, most notably when it came to scenes with Satan and Rose Walker. But, for the most part, the show is faithful to Neil Gaiman's great achievement in '90s comics and we're all better off for it.

3. Peacemaker season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

This is James Gunn at his best. Building off his fabulously fucked up take on The Suicide Squad, this show settles down and gets drunk on thoughtfully fucked family and espionage drama. It was brilliant, captivating, and a whole lot of fun.

2. Better Call Saul season 6 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The subplots about Gus and Lalo never really became interesting and the final episode was a bit of a letdown. However, in the characters of Jimmy/Saul and Kim, this show gave us some of the best writing in television history. Standout episodes "Nippy" and "Waterworks" are like great standalone films, masterpieces of tension and psychological exploration.

1. Andor season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

This one is flawless. Tony Gilroy brought Star Wars back in a big way with this show that is a thought provoking treatise on politics, a captivating character drama, and a suspenseful war narrative. And best of all, it's about how all three of these things work together, making each other more brilliant. To borrow a phrase from Huey Lewis, the heart of Star Wars is still beating.

Japan Continued

My little winter vacation is coming to an end and I'm feeling especially lazy to-day. So here are some pictures that have accumulated on my camera over the past week.

I did go back to Kashiharajingu and was it ever packed.

Covid numbers have been very low in Japan lately and I guess everyone was itching to get back to the normal New Year's temple visit.

Aside from the temple that day, I haven't been getting out much for this vacation. I worked on my comic, though not as much as I'd have liked because I didn't have tracing paper. I'd taken my pad of tracing paper to work a few weeks ago and it rained when I walked home. The whole pad of paper got warped. So on Monday I journeyed to the one place I around here I knew of where I could get some more, a shop called Stationery Club, five train stations north of me and a bit of a walk. As I was leaving the train station, I ran into some second year students from the school where I'm currently working (so they're around 14 years old). Two boys and one girl. They were all eating karaage, Japanese style fried chicken, and walking to Twin Gate. Looks like the Japanese taboo against walking and eating at the same time is dying. They told me they were going bowling. Twin Gate has bowling, darts, video games, slot machines, a movie theatre, a comics shop, and I think pachinko. I was advised never to go into pachinko parlours so I can look like an upstanding citizen. I hate gambling anyway so that's one piece of advice I don't mind following.

Stationery Club was closed so I dropped by Twin Gate on the walk back to have a look around. I ran into a group of high school boys who'd graduated from one of the junior high schools I'd worked at last year. I remember them as a mischievous bunch and I was happy to see them there, hanging out in front of the ice cream shop, posturing like gangsters. The ice cream shop was closed, too, and one of the guys informed me that it was closed until January 4th. Not everything was closed, though. I had a look around the arcade which was equally divided between video games and gambling machines. I didn't see pachinko in there so hopefully my reputation won't suffer. I certainly didn't play anything. I wouldn't have unless I saw a little Black Lodge floating above a machine.

In a lot near the Twin Gate there are these statues I first noticed some time ago:

I walked onto the lot and found this strange but sort of inconspicuous storefront near the back:

Inside was anything but inconspicuous. A used goods shop, it was filled with books, clothes, video games, jewellery, CDs, movies, gaming systems, swords, and guns. Lots of guns. Various handguns and rifles. Japanese gun laws are pretty strict yet here was this arsenal a few feet away from stacks of video games. Gun crime in Japan isn't close to what it is in the U.S., though, so they must be doing something right.

The place also had David Bowie's Outside album in a special two disk version for only 750 yen (around $7.50). I might go back for that.