I’m just going to say it: 2022 might have been the best year for TV. Of all time. Ever.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to scare themselves silly, you’ve had the likes of The Midnight Club, The Devil’s Hour and Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities to get stuck into. Armchair detectives, meanwhile, have had a wealth of true crime documentaries to choose from: think Aftershock, Our Father, Bad Vegan and The Tinder Swindler, to name just a few.

Elsewhere, we ate up big romances such as From Scratch, Uncoupled, The Summer I Turned Pretty and Business Proposal. We laughed (and we cried) over This Is Going To Hurt. We revelled in the back-to-school vibes of Heartbreak High. We obsessed over every last second of Pam & Tommy.

We fell hook, line, and sinker for Slow Horses – and we sank back into returning favourites like White Lotus, Dead To Me and Only Murders In The Building. Like What We Do In The Shadows and Derry Girls. Like Stranger Things, Inside No. 9 and The Handmaid’s Tale – and we sank into them with all the reverence of someone slipping into a bubble bath, too.

Best TV shows of 2022: the 17 series that defined this outrageous year