30 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2022

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The pop culture forecast for 2022 is looking mighty fine, and we’re previewing everything we’re excited about this year with a series of lists. Just so you have it all in one place, we’ve also published our Most Anticipated Albums, Most Anticipated Films, and Rising Artists to Watch roundups. Plus, look out for our list of Most Anticipated Heavy Albums soon.

There are a few trends that emerge for 2022 when it comes to television. The influx of movie stars to the small screen continues, for one thing, with Ewan McGregor, Michelle Pfeiffer, Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Olivia Colman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and more playing featured roles in big properties.

It’s also the year when a number of long-awaited genre properties (with relatively huge production budgets) will be making their debuts: We’re getting Halo, The Sandman, and prequels to The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, hopefully spread out at least a little bit over the next 12 months to keep us nerds entertained all year long.

But more importantly, it’s a year that seems determined to prove that TV, after years of being seen as secondary to film, is where the biggest and most exciting stories can be told, and compellingly so. Not all of the shows on this list will blow us away in terms of quality, but we can’t wait to see how they tackle the complex, intriguing, and fascinating stories promised.

— Liz Shannon Miller

Ozark (Season 4, Part 1) (Netflix)

Created by: Bill Dubuque, Mark Williams

Cast: Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner, Julia Garner, Alfonso Herrera

Premiere Date: January 21st

It’s the beginning of the end for Jason Bateman and Laura Linney’s crime-doing pair, and while we don’t know yet when the final ending will be released on Netflix, the first part of Season 4 does show signs that all of the chickens are coming home to roost — the chickens, in this case, being terrible decisions that the Byrdes have made over the years. Ozark isn’t the sort of show which cries out for a happy ending, but it does deserve a complete one, and here’s looking forward to seeing how all those loose ends get tied up. — L.S.M.

The Gilded Age (HBO)

Created by: Julian Fellowes

Cast: Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Denée Benton, Louisa Jacobson, Taissa Farmiga, Blake Ritson, Simon Jones, Harry Richardson, Thomas Cocquerel, Jack Gilpin

Premiere Date: January 24th

Do you like Downton Abbey, but wish the characters didn’t have all those fancy, hoity-toity accents? Well, you’re in luck: Abbey creator Julian Fellowes is here with a new series for HBO set in New York during the late 1800s — a time of incredible prosperity for America, and the rise of a nouveau riche clashing with the values of the old-money aristocrats of the time. At the center of it is a war between two women: the blue-blood Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and recently-wealthy upstart Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), with all the costumed frippery and withering stares one can expect from Fellowes. — Clint Worthington

The Afterparty (Apple TV+)

Created by: Chris Miller

Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, Zoë Chao, Ben Schwartz, Ike Barinholtz, Ilana Glazer, Dave Franco, Jamie Demetriou, John Early

Premiere Date: January 28th

Apple TV+’s respectable penchant for delivering boatloads of money at A-list creators for off-the-wall concepts continues apace with The Afterparty, which sees an ensemble cast (including Tiffany Haddish, Ilana Glazer, Sam Richardson, and others) trying to solve a murder mystery at their high school reunion. Each of the first season’s eight episodes will follow one character’s account of the events, filtered through a different film genre — musical, film noir, action movie, what have you. It’s a concept that could get tiresome quick, but since genre-bending wunderkinds Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are at the helm (Miller directs all eight episodes), we’re optimistic. — C.W.

Pam & Tommy (Hulu)

Cast: Lily James, Sebastian Stan, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Taylor Schilling

Premiere Date: February 2nd

Does every news and/or tabloid event of the ’90s really warrant its own eight-part miniseries? Pam & Tommy suggests that it might, exploring the dissemination of a famous sex tape from a number of colorful angles, taking a closer look at the guy who stole it (Seth Rogen), sex symbol Pamela Anderson (Lily James), and disagreeable drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan), among others. (Oh, and Jason Mantzoukas voices Tommy Lee’s um, “drumstick.”) Craig Gillespie has experience bringing this sort of material to life in I, Tonya, while writer Robert D. Siegel knows his way around characters on the cultural fringes from his work on The Wrestler and Big Fan. — Jesse Hassenger

Inventing Anna (Netflix)

Created by: Shonda Rhimes

Cast: Anna Chlumsky, Julia Garner, Katie Lowes, Laverne Cox, Alexis Floyd, Arian Moayed, Anders Holm, Anna Deavere Smith, Jeff Perry, Terry Kinney

Premiere Date: February 11th

Shondaland feels like the right home for this more-thrilling-than-fiction tale of Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), a Russian-born con artist who successfully tricked multiple banks, New York high society — and one unsuspecting Vanity Fair employee — into believing she was a German heiress intent on launching her very own private members’ club/art foundation in between luxury vacations to Morocco and living the life of a Manhattan socialite.

The scandal took the media by storm following Anna’s arrest (due in part to a well-timed profile in The Cut), and as the Netflix adaptation prepares to roll out on February 11th, we’re still left grappling with whether Anna’s story is a condemnation of the value we place on image, status, and power — or a masterpiece built on the altar of American ambition. — Glenn Rowley

This Week in TV: ‘Ozark,’ ‘The Gilded Age,’ ‘Promised Land’

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The end begins for one of Netflix’s more popular series when Ozark debuts the first half of its final season this week. Also on tap are a (very) long in the works HBO series, the return of Billions (minus a key figure) to Showtime and a family drama centering Latinx characters on ABC.

Below is The Hollywood Reporter‘s rundown of premieres, returns and specials over the next seven days. It would be next to impossible to watch everything, but let THR point the way to worthy options for the coming week. All times are ET/PT unless noted.

The Big Show

Ozark is splitting its fourth and final season into two parts, with the first half — seven episodes — arriving Friday on Netflix. The show continues to find new ways to put Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) in tight corners — this time in the form of, among other things, being asked to act as go-betweens for a deal between cartel leader Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) and the FBI. Meanwhile Ruth (Julia Garner) and her crew are looking to start making heroin, even further complicating things.

Also on streaming …

More pretty people try exercise self-control in a new season of Too Hot to Handle (Wednesday, Netflix). The World According to Jeff Goldblum (Wednesday, Disney+) delves into puzzles, birthdays and motorcycles in a new batch of episodes. Ed Helms and Randall Park help people tell an extraordinary True Story (Thursday, Peacock). Stanley Tucci and Clarke Peters star in treasure-hunting miniseries La Fortuna (Thursday, AMC+). As We See It (Friday, Prime Video), from Parenthood creator Jason Katims, follows a trio of roommates who are on the autism spectrum. Apple TV+ has two extremely different shows premiering Friday: kids’ series Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock and season three of the M. Night Shyamalan-produced Servant.

On cable …

New: It’s been more than nine years since NBC announced a drama from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes called The Gilded Age. The broadcaster gave it a series order in 2018, but then it moved to HBO a year later. Now, finally, the drama is set to actually air (at 9 p.m Monday): Set in 1890s New York City, it stars Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Louisa Jacobson, Denée Benton and Carrie Coon.

Also: Freeform’s Single Drunk Female (10 p.m. Thursday) follows a young woman (Sofia Black-D’Elia) facing up to her addiction (with humor!). HBO talkers Real Time With Bill Maher and Back on the Record With Bob Costas start new seasons at 10 and 11 p.m. Friday. Billions (9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime) begins its sixth season and first without the departed Damian Lewis; Corey Stoll, who joined in season five, is the new(ish) whale in town. The Snowpiercer train departs for season three at p.m. Monday on TNT. American Dad rolls into its 18th(!) season at 10 p.m. Monday on TBS.

On broadcast …

New: It’s been a while since ABC tried out a soapy family drama, but the network gets back into that game with Promised Land (10 p.m. Monday), a multigenerational saga about a Latinx family fighting — both internally and against outside forces — to keep control of one of the biggest vineyards in California’s Sonoma Valley. Also Monday, The CW debuts a short-run docuseries called March about the marching band at Prairie View A&M University in Texas.

The Gilded Age

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Never the New

Period drama set against the backdrop of the American Gilded Age, following the fortunes of Marian, a young woman who moves from rural Pennsylvania to New York City after the death of her father to live with her wealthy aunt. Starring Louisa Jacobson, Christine Baranski and Denée Benton.

S1 Ep1 105min

‘How lucky was I?’: The Good Fight’s Christine Baranski on Sondheim, stardom and snobbery

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Christine Baranski is an “Oh, her …” kind of actor. Casual observers might not recognise her name, but they always, instantly, know her face. “Oh, her,” they say, when they see her starring in The Good Fight, the successful spin-off to the TV drama The Good Wife, in which she also co-starred. “It’s the woman who played Leonard’s mother on The Big Bang Theory and Meryl Streep’s high-kicking friend in Mamma Mia!” “Oh, her,” they say, when they spot her in comedy classic Bowfinger. “It’s the woman who brings sass and class to whatever she’s in.” Exactly. That’s her.

With her high-toned enunciation and elegant bearing that verges on regal, Baranski seems like the human embodiment of Manhattan’s Upper East Side circa 1955, and when we connect via video call she initially fulfils all preconceptions. “Now, tell me about London, how are things going there? Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says.

Her emphases and enunciations – “what” is “w-hat”, “gorgeous” is “gor-ge-ous” – make her a little reminiscent of theatrical characters from bygone eras, such as those in the musical Mame and the women in Follies. Baranski has appeared in both of those shows because, alongside her TV and movie career, she is a theatrical force, as at home in Broadway musicals as she is in TV dramas, and she has two Tony awards alongside her Emmy and SAG awards to prove it.

Today, she is sitting in her elegant apartment on, yes, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, decorated with expensive looking wall-hangings and chic patterned curtains. The 69-year-old is looking pretty expensive and chic herself, with a trim dancer’s figure that suggests she’s not really one for big lunches.

Baranski as Diane Lockhart in The Good Fight. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images

But she’s far warmer than her glossy exterior suggests, cooing delightedly when I apologise for the noise of my children (“Oh, your babies!”) and fretting that she won’t give me good enough copy. In fact, she is a far cry from the well-born lady she looks like – and invariably plays.

“Even when I was studying acting at the Juilliard, I was often cast as the sophisticated best friend with the witty line, and it’s so funny to me because I do not come from a wealthy background. I’m from a blue-collar neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, and if you’re writing for the Guardian, you could say that’s like Manchester,” she adds helpfully (although I reckon Newcastle is a closer English equivalent to Buffalo).

Baranski grew up “a latchkey kid”, the daughter of a working mother who struggled to pay the bills after Baranski’s beloved father died when she was only eight. Her grandparents were Polish immigrants and she grew up in a Polish-American community. I tell her that I, too, am third-generation Polish and no one in my family sounds like her.

“You know, I remember even in high school people would say: ‘You don’t sound like us, you sound English.’ I think I decided early on that I wanted to speak a certain way, and it was a projection on my part. I wanted to go to New York and be a theatre actress, and I’m living my image of the kind of woman I wanted to be,” she says.

Was she rebelling against her background? “It wasn’t a rebellion, but by junior high [12 to 13 years old] it was clear to me I wasn’t going to stay in Buffalo. I was on fire once I realised how empowered I felt on the stage.”

When she was a teenager, Baranski’s idol was Maggie Smith. Now, pleasingly, Baranski is playing what can be described as “the Maggie Smith role” in Julian Fellowes’ new HBO series, The Gilded Age, which can equally be called “American Downton”. It is set in New York, and in the 1880s as opposed to the war years. But otherwise, it’s got all of Fellowes’ hallmarks: bossy mistresses of the house, grumbling servants and fascinatingly bizarre snobberies.

As Agnes van Rijn in The Gilded Age. Photograph: Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO

Here, the biggest snob is Baranski’s character, Agnes van Rijn. She refuses to let her young niece (Louisa Jacobson), who has just arrived in New York, mix with any of the “new people”, ie those whose ancestors arrived more recently than 200 years ago. Baranski fits the role like a lady’s hand in a satin glove. “Does anyone write a snob better than Julian Fellowes? That class of people who don’t even know what a weekend is,” she says, with relish.

Fellowes had Baranski in mind when he created the part because years earlier, when they’d met at an industry event, she had told him she was a fan of Downton. She also mentioned that her husband’s grandmother was the author and heiress Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, “and Julian knew the Drexels well”, which is more than I do (quick research reveals they were an old American banking family).

Baranski had never been in a period film or TV show, but has done plenty of restoration comedies and Shakespeare on stage, “so I know my way around a corset and wig”. When Fellowes finally finished writing The Gilded Age and came knocking, Baranski had only three words for him: “Yes, yes, yes.”

As well as The Gilded Age, Baranski is the star of The Good Fight, which will soon release its sixth season. Between The Good Wife and The Good Fight, she has played the wildly adored liberal lawyer Diane Lockhart for 13 years. The danger of doing anything for so long, she says, “is you run out of colour, but we react to current events. We could be on until the ice caps melt.”

As careers go, it’s not bad for a woman on the verge of 70, who didn’t even start acting on TV until her early 40s. “I can look back and think: ‘How often did I not get a role because I wasn’t pretty enough?’ But look at the position I’m in now – two great roles, [my characters are] both No 1 on the call sheet. I’m like: ‘Damn! Late 60s and here I am.’ There is progress!” she laughs.

With Julie Walters and Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, 2008. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Allstar

There is progress, but there is also Baranski, who has always felt more like an exception than a rule. After graduating from the Juilliard, she won her first Tony in her second Broadway play, when she played Charlotte in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, in which Cynthia Nixon – who now plays her sister in The Gilded Age – played her daughter. Stephen Sondheim spotted her soon after, and she not only worked on most of his musicals, from Company to Assassins, but she also became his friend.

“I was playing Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd in Washington, and Steve came to see our first run-through, which happened to be on my 50th birthday. Afterwards, I went out to a fish restaurant with my cast. Then, suddenly, Steve turned up! He said: ‘I never miss a 50th, and he drank glass after glass of wine, talking about what it was like to be part of West Side Story. I thought: ‘Who gets a birthday like this?’” she says.

Although Baranski has an apartment in New York for work, her main home is in Connecticut, and it sounds as if she lives in a particularly exciting corner of the state, given that her neighbours include Meryl Streep, Patti LuPone and – until his death in November – Sondheim. “After Meryl and I did Into the Woods,” she says, referring to the 2014 film adaptation of Sondheim’s musical, in which she played Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and Streep starred as the witch, “I’d say to her: ‘Let’s get together with Steve!’ So I had the pleasure of some long dinners with him.”

With Cybill Shepherd in Cybill, 1995. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images

Baranski met her husband, Matthew Cowles, who was also an actor, when they appeared in Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1982. He offered her a lift home on his motorcycle “and the rest is history”, she says. They moved to Connecticut because he inherited his family home there, but raising their two daughters on theatre actors’ wages wasn’t easy. So, when Baranski was offered a role on Cybill in the mid 90s, the money was tempting, but the prospect of commuting to LA every week was not. The money won. “It was a very anguished decision. My girls were five and eight, I think, and Matthew stayed home with them. But when I read the script by Chuck Lorre, this guy I’d never heard of, and saw how he’d written the character Maryanne, with the dry wit and martinis, I thought: ‘Oh, I know how to play this.’”

She did. The show was supposed to be a star vehicle for Cybill Shepherd, but Baranski instantly stole it, and at the end of the first season she won an Emmy. Shepherd did not. Lorre has since claimed that Shepherd was jealous of Baranski. Shepherd put it differently in her memoir, Cybill Disobedience, insisting that the reason she and Baranski didn’t get on was because Baranski was unfriendly. Alicia Witt, who played Shepherd’s daughter, later said that Shepherd “kinda said some pretty mean things about pretty much everyone she worked with, as I understand”. The show ended after four seasons.

“I have never publicly gone into that,” says Baranski when I ask about Shepherd. “Yes, there were issues, but I prefer to take the higher ground and say, look, that show gave me so much. I was fine working with her. Politically, it did get difficult, but I wish her well.” And clearly she got on with Lorre better than Shepherd did, given that he later put her in his world-dominating sitcom, The Big Bang Theory.

Even before Cybill ended, Baranski was getting offers of roles in films. One of the first she accepted was in the American remake of the French comedy classic, La Cage aux Folles, which was re-titled The Birdcage and directed by Mike Nichols, playing Robin Williams’ sort-of ex. Did she and Williams stay friends afterwards?

With Robin Williams in The Birdcage. Photograph: Frank Trapper/Corbis/Getty Images

“Not friends exactly – he was already a huge star and I lived back east. But he did give me a beautiful book at the end of shooting, about [the theatre actor] Katharine Cornell, who was also from Buffalo. Anyone who knew him would say he had the most extraordinary beauty, a kind of warmth and sweetness …” she trails off fondly.

In The Birdcage, she has an especially memorable scene in which she – in the world’s tiniest miniskirt – and Williams dance, and I tell her it’s astonishing how she looks basically the same in that as she does in her dance scene in Mamma Mia!, despite the two decades between the two films.

“I find it a professional obligation to stay in shape. If we’re talking girl talk, I do pilates, because it keeps me toned and strong. As an actor, you have to protect your instrument, so I wouldn’t smoke now because it affects the voice. You have to be able to do whatever they need you to do, even after 14 hours of work,” she says.

Baranski is, to use that very old-fashioned theatrical term, a trouper. But given that we’re talking girl talk, I say, was it ever hard for her husband that she was so much more successful than him? She considers her words carefully before answering.

With her husband Matthew Cowles, 2009. Photograph: Ben Hider/Getty Images

“All successful women know this: you pay a price for being the person who gets more wattage. I remember once, on the red carpet, a photographer actually shouted at him: ‘Get out of the way, you’re standing in her light.’ Matthew was so gracious, saying: ‘Of course, of course.’ But I just cringed inside, it was my Judy Garland moment,” she says, referring to the scene in 1954’s A Star is Born, when James Mason is shoved aside by photographers to get a photo of Garland.

“I think every marriage is supremely challenging, but my late husband was enormously supportive and very proud of me, and I think we managed it quite well. He was an exceptional person.” She starts to recall a time when he encouraged her to take a part when she was wavering, but suddenly breaks off, crying. Cowles died in 2014.

We turn to more cheerful subjects, namely, their daughters, Lily, who is an actor, and Isabel, “who has given me three beautiful grandsons. They. Could. Not. Be. Cuter!” she says with emphasis, but the tears are still there. I apologise for bringing up painful memories.

“Oh no, I’m happy to know that the love I have for him is still so real. Too often, we look at our lives and we have regrets, and what makes good copy is people bad-mouthing each other and talking about how hard it was. But I’m not that person. I look at myself and I say: ‘How lucky was I?’”

The Gilded Age will be available from 25 January on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW.

BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Gary Oldman set to come in from the cold to reprise role of George Smiley

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Gary Oldman is prepared to come in from the cold to play the unobtrusive but brilliant spymaster, George Smiley, again.

Twelve years ago, Oldman successfully took on John le Carre’s ‘breathtakingly ordinary’ secret intelligence officer in a film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — following Alec Guinness’s flawless portrait in the BBC’s 1979 version.

Guinness played the bespectacled spook a second time, three years later, in Smiley’s People.

The author’s estate now controls the rights to that one, and they’re planning a TV re-boot. ‘Gary would very much love to play George Smiley again,’ Douglas Urbanski, the actor’s long time business partner, told me on Wednesday night.

Gary Oldman is prepared to come in from the cold to play the unobtrusive but brilliant spymaster, George Smiley, again

In fact, Oldman has told me so himself. Several years ago he was in discussions to lead a big screen version of Smiley’s People, but there were unresolved rights issues at the time, and the idea was abandoned.

The new Smiley’s People would form part of an epic series of seasons devoted to le Carre’s novels, beginning with the novelist’s 1963 breakthrough, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The project has been in development for several years; but filming could finally start later this year, or early next, a source close to le Carre’s heirs told me.

The Smiley’s People mini-series would likely follow that. The plot calls for George to come out of retirement to smoke out his most feared enemy: Karla, the cunning head of Soviet intelligence.

Last time round, he gained weight by indulging in treacle sponge and custard. ‘I called it eating for George,’ Oldman, who won an Oscar for portraying Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, told me

If it all comes together, Oldman will have to put on a few pounds to play the portly Circus ringmaster. Last time round, he gained weight by indulging in treacle sponge and custard.

‘I called it eating for George,’ Oldman, who won an Oscar for portraying Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, told me.

The actor has been honing his spycraft skills recently, playing an altogether different variant to Smiley in Slow Horses. The AppleTV+ creation, based on the delicious series of books by Mick Herron, features a motley crew of ‘f***-ups and rejects’, as Oldman put it, from MI5. He plays the misfits’ wily boss, Jackson Lamb, ‘a farting, belching, working class version of George Smiley’.

Apple have allowed Oldman, Urbanski and fellow producers See-Saw Films, to devote six episodes to each of the Herron tomes, with 12 episodes in each season. The cast includes Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas (who played Clementine Churchill in Darkest Hour) and Jonathan Pryce.

Those who have viewed a rough cut tell me that it’s sensational.

Star-studded Downton of New York

Old money, old families, ambitious arrivistes, shenanigans on all floors … must be a new Julian Fellowes drama.

However, for The Gilded Age, he takes us across the Atlantic — time travelling back to 1882, flinging open the shutters on the grand mansions that lined the Upper West Side of New York’s Fifth Avenue.

‘They have been in charge since the Mayflower,’ one character says of the city’s ruling class into which our heroine, Marion Brook, an orphaned young woman played by Louisa Jacobson, is plunged when she seeks shelter with her aristocratic aunts, played by Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski.

Baranski’s eagle-eyed, regal Agnes van Rhijn is a sort of American cousin to Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess in Downtown Abbey, with a tongue just as sharp.

Old money, old families, ambitious arrivistes, shenanigans on all floors … must be a new Julian Fellowes drama. However, for The Gilded Age, he takes us across the Atlantic — time travelling back to 1882, flinging open the shutters on the grand mansions that lined the Upper West Side of New York’s Fifth Avenue

There are all manner of intrigues in the plot, most involving Jacobson’s Marion and Denee Benton as her friend Peggy Scott.

The story also spins around merciless magnate George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his avaricious wife Bertha (Carrie Coon). Their graduate son Larry is played by Harry Richardson — Drake Carne in Poldark. And Taissa Farmiga has a key role as daughter Gladys.

Fellowes, fellow production executive Gareth Neame and their team gathered a sublime ensemble that includes the crème de la crème of Broadway. As I viewed the first five episodes (of the nine-part first season), I spotted Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara, Nathan Lane and Katie Finneran, people I’ve watched on the New York stage for years.

Jeanne Tripplehorn and Bill Irwin are in the company, too. Let’s hope HBO books a second season.

The Gilded Age will be on Sky Atlantic and NOW from January 25.