The Best Comedy Shows Of 2022

Once limited to just a few two-hour blocks of primetime on the big four broadcast networks, TV comedy has exploded in not just reach and availability, but in approach and quality, too. Not too long ago, a television comedy was a "sitcom" — a laugh track-enhanced, predictable bit of innocuous entertainment shot on a soundstage in front of a studio audience and about the daily foibles of a workplace or a family. With the dawn of "Peak TV," enabled by the proliferation of streaming services and cable networks willing to take a chance on show creators with singular visions, there's more space and demand than ever before for content, particularly comedies. As a result, we're living in a golden age of the small-screen-com, with a number of wildly creative, original, and inventive shows offering compelling plots, unforgettable characters, and, of course, plenty of laughs, all in a more cinematic format.

In 2022, dozens of new shows debuted across the many traditional and digital outlets available to viewers. Here are the best ones to debut this year.

Created by Christopher Miller, one half of the duo responsible for the gleeful and sharp silliness of "Clone High" and "The Lego Movie," "The Afterparty" will leave viewers speculating until the very end about the identity and motive of a killer. While it's a classic murder-mystery, it's also extremely inventive and fun in its approach to the tried-and-true format. Not only does each episode of this Apple TV+ series reveal more and more crucial details, but each installment is presented from the point of view of a different member of the vast cast of characters, and in a different style. These shifts in presentation range from Disney Channel-esque musical to animation with a few equally surprising stops in between.

When a group of graduates from the class of 2006 get together for their high school reunion in Northern California, they attend an afterparty at the palatial beachside home of Xavier (Dave Franco), now an international pop star and A-list actor. When he winds up dead on the shore, quirky investigator with something to prove Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) interviews all the party guests. They've all got their reasons to wish Xavier dead, be it unrequited love, old grudges, or professional betrayal.

Equal parts cop show, cop show parody, long-form improvised comedy, and celebrity game show, Netflix's proudly low-budget "Murderville" depicts the captivating adventures of Terry Seattle, a grizzled sad sack of a detective. Seattle forever mourns his deceased partner and halfway investigates her death when he isn't complaining about his life, pining for his ex-wife (who is also his police captain), and training new partners. In each episode, he gets a new detective partner, all portrayed by celebrity guest stars playing some heightened version of themselves — in a murder of the week. Will Arnett of "Arrested Development" and "BoJack Horseman" is deeply committed to playing the hapless, emotionally uncontrolled Seattle as he guides and resents partners like Conan O'Brien, Ken Jeong, and Sharon Stone as they investigate cartoonish suspects with jokes and questions off the tops of their heads. Arnett constantly tries to unsteady his partners, making for a lot of off-the-cuff comedy gold as the guests race to play along.

In the past half-decade, the TV dial and most streaming platforms have become inundated with reboots — present-day revivals of beloved hit shows from the 1990s and 2000s. Results have varied, leading viewers to question what it was they liked about the original while also reckoning with the passage of time. Those issues are addressed head on and with hilarious brutality in "Reboot," a meta, self-referential behind-the-scenes mockumentary comedy and showbiz satire about the making of a reboot of a fondly remembered 2000s sitcom.

The plot: The cast of "Step Right Up" reunites in the present day for a Hulu reboot, and they confront themselves and each other about their messy personal lives and less than illustrious professional paths taken since their big breakthrough gig got canceled. Reed Sterling (Keegan-Michael Key) played the father figure only to go on to a lackluster career in theater, while Clay Barber (Johnny Knoxville) became a drug abusing tabloid fixture. Meanwhile, original creator Gordon Gelman (Paul Reiser) just can't let go of his past glories. They're a dysfunctional family, even though they're also a fake family.

"Shining Vale" simply feels like a professional operation dealing in sharp, tight comedy made by people who know what they're doing and know how to mine the limited confines of a TV comedy script for maximum laughs. The Starz original series features Courteney Cox and the affable comedic veteran Greg Kinnear as the heads of the Phelps family, who move out of the big city and into a beautiful old house in a cute small town. They have no idea that horrible, deadly, bloody things have occurred in this house, thus making it extremely, consistently haunted by ghosts and demons. As it turns out, the malignant spirits really like to mess with the Phelpses, particularly the parents, who are desperately trying to heal their fractured family after some infidelity on the part of Patricia — the first one to sense that something isn't quite right. "Shining Vale" is a refreshing comedy in that it takes the very familiar and very predictable haunted house premise and makes it entirely new by demonstrating just how absurdly funny a notion it is to share one's personal living space with evil supernatural beings.

Inscrutable experimental comedian Nathan Fielder conducted four seasons worth of artful real-life comedy in the form of pranks disguised as quasi-helpful small business consulting on Comedy Central's "Nathan for You." His slow-burning, fascinating HBO show "The Rehearsal" takes his comedic ideas to inventive, unsteady, and unbelievable heights. At the beginning of the series, Fielder sets out to help awkward civilians prepare for uncomfortable or stressful situations, like helping a man admit to his pub quiz friend that he isn't as educated as he'd claimed. Fielder helps this guy, and others, by attempting to predict every possible scenario that could occur with a hilarious, perhaps even unsettling dedication to authenticity. He builds a replica of the bar where the confrontation would take place and hires an army of actors to play strangers that could be nearby. But then one big project comes to dominate the season — Nathan helps a woman decide whether or not she wants to be a mother by re-creating, in scaled down terms, 18 years of motherhood. Fielder, and the emotionally fraught nature of the situation itself, blurs the lines between reality and narrative, placing the artist at the center of the story in which he tries to remain an objective observer and controller.

"Sprung" is set during what already feels like ancient times — the early and confusing days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With much of the world shut down and millions forced into their homes, it might have been the perfect time for a massive heist by a gang of small-time crooks brought together by the unprecedented events of the era to form into a de facto family. Poking fun at the universal experiences and quirks of the tragic, devastating pandemic makes for a tricky premise, but Amazon Freevee's "Sprung," written and directed by Greg Garcia — comic chronicler of the American working class and subsistence criminals via "Raising Hope" and "My Name is Earl," respectively — pulls it off. When nonviolent offender Jack (Garret Dillahunt) is released from prison as a virus-inhibiting measure, he has nowhere to go and heads home with his also-sprung cellmate Rooster (Phillip Garcia) and Gloria (Shakira Barrera), his prison girlfriend who he's never seen and only spoken to through a toilet. Rooster's mother Barb (Martha Plimpton) puts them to work in her small, very-pandemic-era criminal enterprise, stealing Amazon packages and swindling a toilet paper hoarder and such, before Gloria concocts a plan to steal a fortune in art from a virus-profiteering member of Congress.