A Year of Interconnected Television: How 2022’s Best Series Created a Collective Conversation
In a remarkable year for television, 2022’s standout series appeared to engage in a shared dialogue that transcended individual storylines and networks. Shows like “Severance,” “The Pitt,” “Andor,” “Pluribus,” and “The Lowdown” created an unexpected tapestry of interconnected themes despite their diverse genres and production backgrounds. This phenomenon wasn’t merely coincidental but reflected broader societal concerns and artistic responses to our complex modern world. As viewers moved between these distinct narrative universes, they encountered recurring explorations of identity, power structures, memory, and resistance that seemed to echo and amplify across different shows.
The workplace dystopia of “Severance” examined the ultimate work-life balance through its surgically divided employees, creating a haunting metaphor for compartmentalization in our lives. Meanwhile, “The Pitt” delved into community dynamics during crisis, revealing how collective trauma reshapes social bonds and individual psychology. These series, despite their surface differences, both questioned fundamental aspects of human connection in systems designed to separate and control us. The conversations between these shows happened not in their plots but in their shared concerns: how do we maintain our humanity when forces beyond our control attempt to fragment our experiences? Both offered different but complementary perspectives on memory as both burden and salvation.
Perhaps most surprising was how “Andor,” a series set in the well-established Star Wars universe, managed to transcend its franchise origins to deliver one of the year’s most incisive political dramas. Its nuanced portrayal of resistance movements and imperial bureaucracy found unexpected parallels in the contemporary American setting of “The Lowdown,” which examined similar dynamics of power and opposition through a completely different genre lens. Both shows rejected simplistic moral frameworks in favor of complex characters operating in morally ambiguous systems. They asked viewers to consider not just what resistance looks like but what it costs those who undertake it, and whether institutions can ever be reformed from within or must be challenged from without.
“Pluribus” stood out for its innovative structure and diverse storytelling approaches, yet it too seemed to be responding to the same cultural moment as its contemporaries. Its anthology format allowed for exploration of fractured perspectives and competing truths—themes that resonated strongly with “Severance’s” literally divided consciousness and “The Pitt’s” community of conflicting memories. All three shows grappled with questions of how we construct reality from imperfect information and whether shared understanding is even possible in a world of individualized experiences. Their approaches varied dramatically, from science fiction concepts to psychological realism, yet they collectively formed a mosaic of responses to our era’s crisis of truth and meaning.
What made this unofficial dialogue between series particularly fascinating was how it transcended network boundaries, streaming platforms, and target demographics. Shows produced for entirely different audiences somehow found themselves contributing to a larger conversation about contemporary anxieties. This wasn’t coordinated by studios or showrunners but emerged organically from creators responding to the same cultural climate. The artistic resonance between these series reflected a moment where traditional boundaries—between work and personal life, between resistance and complicity, between memory and identity—have become increasingly blurred in our actual lives. Television, in its most ambitious forms, wasn’t just reflecting these conditions but actively helping viewers process and understand them.
As we look back at this remarkable year in television, what stands out isn’t just the individual quality of these shows but how they collectively created something greater than the sum of their parts. By accidentally engaging with similar themes from different angles, they provided viewers with a multifaceted exploration of contemporary existence that no single series could accomplish alone. This conversation between shows demonstrates how television has evolved into a medium capable of sustained, complex cultural dialogue. “Severance,” “The Pitt,” “Andor,” “Pluribus,” and “The Lowdown” may have told wildly different stories, but together they mapped the contours of our shared uncertainties and aspirations, proving that even in an era of fragmented media consumption, television can still create meaningful connections across its diverse landscape.
