When you present a list of the year’s best movies, you are presenting a list of the year’s best movies. They are closed entities, and your opinion of RRR or Everything Everywhere All At Once is based entirely on the 2-3 hours you spent watching it.
Television is more complicated, because each show is many episodes combined into one season. Sometimes, the whole season is great; sometimes, only an individual episode might qualify. So as we continue to look back on the pop culture highlights of 2022, we wanted to consider not just the best overall series, but the best episodes. Some of the episodes — listed alphabetically below — were part of series featured on that Top 20 list published earlier this month, while others are from series that every so often were able to play with the big boys. We’ve got musicals, anthologies, chase scenes, multiple visits to the postapocalypse, and, yes, A Goofy Movie.