Something strange happened in television this year: TV shows started disappearing. Well, they were disappeared.
Warner Bros Discovery, formed by the mega-merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery Communications, has yanked more than 80 of its own titles from its streaming service HBO Max to avoid residual payments to cast, crew and writers.
Even Westworld, a recent flagship slab of HBO dystopia, is already so irrelevant to its new owners that its four-season archive is now just an expense on a balance sheet to be obliterated. What a business.
But if the Great Deletion was a new narrative, the old one hadn’t gone away. Streamers began 2022 caught up in a blaze of exorbitant budgets, pumping out content in a valiant bid to contain rising rates of subscriber churn.
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Netflix’s heaviest hitters were Stranger Things’s fourth season, Tim Burton’s Wednesday and Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, with the winner out of all of the above somehow ending up being Kate Bush.
A strong year for Netflix documentaries included Downfall: The Case Against Boeing and the beyond disturbing Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, though the only documentary series to near the budgets lavished on its top dramas was Harry & Meghan, for which Netflix reportedly paid $100 million – roughly the cost of three episodes of Stranger Things.
The six-part royal headline-generator meshed the sad soap of family estrangement with a stealthy critique of the concept of monarchy and went on to become the streamer’s most-viewed documentary. It also served as a companion piece to the penultimate season of The Crown, my favourite scene in which was an imagined dance between Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville) and old flame Peter Townsend (Timothy Dalton).
But as subscriber numbers stalled, Netflix’s year was marked by an about-turn to embrace advertising, while its avoidance of live sport seems increasingly conspicuous.
At rival Disney Plus, meanwhile, highlights included The Bear, set in the hitherto unexplored world of a Chicago sandwich shop, the return of charming New York comedy mystery Only Murders in the Building and Star Wars: Andor, blessed with the talent of Diego Luna.
Disney had its fair share of intrigue off-screen, too. Having trimmed back its planned total content spend from $33 billion to a still whopping $30 billion, chief executive Bob Chapek was ousted in November, with his successor also being his predecessor: former chief executive Bob Iger.
Apple TV Plus gave us workplace satire Severance, Sharon Horgan’s black comedy Bad Sisters and WeCrashed, part of a vogue for dramas based on real-life business hubris, though its most notable title was not a series, but a film. CODA’s triumph at the Oscars meant Apple beat both Netflix and Amazon to become the first streamer to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Amazon’s 2022 revolved around the expensive extravaganza that was The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, production of which has now decamped from New Zealand to the UK.
While my own need for sleep intervened before I could revisit Middle Earth, Prime Video had other, cheaper jewels. In Ireland, it was the home for HBO Max’s splendid intergenerational culture-clash comedy Hacks, while no year that features new episodes of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel can be regarded as a bad one.
On broadcast television, spring brought us two largely internationally-funded dramas adapted from Irish novels, with Brenda Fricker showing her class in ITV-Virgin Media Television’s Holding and Jemima Kirke underused in RTÉ-backed Conversations With Friends.
The latter might have had television’s most downbeat lead character, but its makers, Dublin-based film and TV producers Element Pictures, had an upbeat time, selling a majority stake to production and distribution giant Fremantle in May.
It was a year of goodbyes, with Erin (Saoirse Monica-Jackson) delivering a pathos-laden final speech in Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls, Better Call Saul wrapping on Netflix, Peaky Blinders finally running out of bullets on the BBC and Channel 5 pulling the plug on Neighbours.
The axing of the Australian soap after 37 years triggered outpourings of cheery nostalgia and a mass return to Ramsay Street, only for Amazon Freevee (not yet available here) to agree to revive it.
Also failing to stay dead this year was Ursula (Thomasin McKenzie) in the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life, one of the most powerful dramas of 2022.
Indeed, the centenary-celebrating BBC showed that it was still a byword for quality through documentaries House of Maxwell, Big Oil vs the World and Aids: The Unheard Tapes, plus dramas from James Graham’s devastating Sherwood and British-Australian thriller The Tourist to the return of high-finance antics in HBO-BBC co-production Industry.
And then there was “cosy” mainstay Call the Midwife, which followed its heroin-and-leeches themed Christmas special with some delightful gangrene. “His foot’s come off with the shoe,” whispered appalled midwife Nancy (Ireland’s own Megan Cusack).
But the top programmes of the year, for me, originated from the entity seemingly embroiled in the most corporate chaos, Warner Bros Discovery, via HBO’s distribution deal with Sky.
I said no to House of the Dragon – the first episode of the Game of Thrones spin-off had a maternal death depiction too brutal to forgive – but yes to the second run of The White Lotus, a clever reinvention of the mystery genre shot in a warm Sicilian glow, and Irma Vep, which would take too long to describe here.
If I had to choose just one show to “save” for posterity, it would be the Elena Ferrante adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, HBO’s bellissimo co-production with Italian public broadcaster Rai, which reached the 1970s in its third season, and in its story of power, solidarity and independence was nothing short of art.
Distribution of HBO shows in Ireland will likely change in the future with Warner Bros Discovery set to combine HBO Max with Discovery Plus into a single global streamer, possibly called Max.
Maxed out is precisely what some analysts say the industry has become. John Landgraf, the boss of Disney subsidiary FX who coined the phrase “peak TV” to describe the swelling glut of scripted television shows, believes 2022 will “end up maybe being the absolute peak”.
Either way, accountancy machinations, licensing rights gaps and reluctance to release DVD hard copies has prompted alarmed talk about the uneven preservation of this television boom.
We’re nowhere near the days when broadcasters would wipe the only videotapes of the programmes they made because they wanted to reuse the tape. But in 2022, television felt oddly ephemeral. Next year may bring more wobbles, more strategy shifts, more vanishings.
