A Few Favorite 2022 Things

Ones that are actually FROM 2022!

Greetings, Dames Nation! Darling Dame Karen is under the weather, so it’s just me this week. All of the culture critics are releasing their Best of 2022 lists these days, and you can look forward to a Best Things Not From 2022, Which We Enjoyed In 2022 issue from us in the near future. For this week, though, I’ll share a few 2022 things — some cultural, one practical — that I think are worth sharing from this year.

Books, aka LOLSOB: a brief respite in my reading slump over the summer ended with the closure of the pool, so my pick for the best new book I read in 2022 is Séamas O’Reilly’s uproariously funny, heartbreaking, and all around lovely memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?. As you may have gathered from the title, it’s about the death of Séamas’s mother. That premise is sad enough, but when you know that Séamas was five at the time, and has ten siblings, it feels like a whole other kind of story.

And sure, there’s a fair bit of grieving in these page, and reflecting on the nature of memory — of the living as well as the dead — and the gutting sadness of losing a beloved parent so young, but sorrow doesn’t haunt these pages as much as you might think. By structuring each chapter around a specific episode in the family’s life, O’Reilly avoids the traps of sentimentality and tragedy porn. The whole book has a strong air of “my mother’s death is right there in the title, obviously it’s awful, but let’s not belabor it, ok? I’m from Derry, and if there’s one thing we’re good at here, it’s knowing how to take bleak, fathomless grief and find a way to laugh in the midst of it, anyway.” I’m sure there’s an impossibly long single compound word for this in German, but you get the idea. Worth every moment I spent with it.

Podcasts: 2022 was a year of my husband — a lifelong Formula 1 fan — being happily baffled by me and our 17 year-old experiencing intense, rapid-onset Formula 1 fandom. We devoured Formula 1: Drive to Survive on Netflix, I wrote about it for Vulture (two whole times!), we subscribed to F1TV (a thing I didn’t even know existed until this year), and devoted our rapt-est attention to the wild driver-and-team negotiations, announcements, and announcement retractions of a very silly Silly Season. The family that collectively hyper-fixates on a sport together, stays together? At the very least, it reduces the likelihood of having to negotiate what we’ll be watching together! All of which is a huge wind-up to my endorsement of Choosing Sides: F1 as an invaluable resource if you’re even the least bit curious about this wildly expensive and dangerous sport where twenty dudes zoom very very fast around twisty-windy tracks the world over. CS:F1 is a limited run series, each of the 16 episodes a conversation between F1 expert Lily Herman and professional funnyman Michael Kosta. The goal is for Michael, an F1-curious person, to learn about and choose a favorite team and favorite driver. It’s effervescent and erudite, and I’m in debt to Vulture’s podcast critic Nick Quah for the recommendation. (PS: Nick’s Best of 2022 piece is a must-read for anyone casting about for a new-to-you show or five.)

TV has supplanted music and even reading in my cultural repertoire this year, for a variety of reasons, and as I reviewed some notes about my favorites over the course of the year, a unifying theme emerged: people doing their best, often messily but always earnestly, to work through trauma. The crème de la crème for me are:

Andor: this is a great Star Wars show for people are kind of sick of Star Wars shows (no Skywalkers! no Solos! no Jedi!). In fact, you could enjoy every frame of Andor without knowing anything at all about Star Wars! It’s a rich tapestry of a show that unfolds without rushing, weaving together elements of family dramas, heists, and espionage/political thrillers. Oh, and the Space Nazis are revealed to be a bunch of petty (so, so petty!) bureaucrats, which is part delicious, part dry ice-level chilling. A second, final season will come to Disney+ sometime in 2024, I think?

The Bear: an intense workplace dramedy about an award-winning chef who returns home to Chicago to try to keep the family business going after his brother dies by suicide. It’s about Carmi and his family (particularly his loud — my god, so loud! — cousin Richie) and his late brother’s grieving staff all clumsily staggering their way towards making their gem of a little hole in the wall sandwich place work, as a workplace and mainstay of the neighborhood. The Bear was a total surprise to me, one I’ve continued to ponder since wolfing it down in July. Renewed for a second season on FX/Hulu.

Somebody, Somewhere: I should have known that I needed a show about doing your best to navigate the uneven, constantly shifting terrain of grief, frequently making an absolute hash of it, and being reminded that you’re worthy of love and friendship and grace, anyway. Oh, and transcendent amateur live musical performance! A second season is coming to HBO in 2023. I can’t wait.

Reservation Dogs: I try my best not to indulge in telling anyone that they must watch, read, or listen to anything. It’s annoying and presumptuous! What do I know about your genre preferences and frame of mind? I make an exception for Reservation Dogs, which wrapped its second, revelatory season this fall. It’s everything I wanted but didn’t know could be incorporated into a single show — it’s full of artful performances that seem effortless; as likely to provoke wracking sobs as belly laughs (both fully earned); grounded in reality and leavened by fantasy; eminently watchable and worthy of re-watching. The first season was great, the second, a masterpiece. Another FX/Hulu series, with a third season on the horizon. You gotta watch this show.

And finally: a tip about shoes. I want to put in a small word for having your shoes stretched a bit. Just a bit! Carefully, and by a professional shoe person. Perhaps you take a half size and the brand(s) you favor don’t do half sizes. Perhaps you found yourself needing a slightly larger shoe in or following pregnancy. Whatever the situation, if your shoes are a bit too small, I encourage you to take them to your local shoe person to see if they’ll be wearable once more with a small stretch. It’s always worth asking, I think.