Choose your pickings: top five tech TV shows of 2022

Honestly, the amount of TV shows around is just staggering – no wonder it’s hard to find the news worthy of your attention. But what if the playlist consisted of specifically tech-related series?

Cybernews decided to help you separate the wheat from the chaff, and hereby humbly declares these five TV shows are the best technology-related pieces of content released in 2022.

Severance (Apple TV+)

Have you ever thought it might be cool to totally separate your brain into work and home halves? It’s impossible in real life, even though one could find many who would gladly skip bringing all of that office hogwash – be it the cubicles, the open spaces, or the filthy gossip – back home.

Severance, released this year on Apple TV+, tries to portray how the arrangement would look like – and more. It’s a brilliant comedy-drama, directed by Ben Stiller, where the “innies” (work selves) have no idea what the “outies” are doing in the after hours.

Well, at least initially. Things soon get complicated, and you feel like the stylish show is asking the right and profound questions about free will, choice, or existence in a wider sense. Most importantly, no one hurries about and gives you time to digest all this.

1899 (Netflix)

This is not the kind of show you think it’s going to be. At the beginning, we are plunged into a late-Victorian nautical world that appears to pre-empt the Titanic’s doomed trans-Atlantic voyage, as a luxury liner runs into unforeseen trouble.

The polyglot crew of passengers from Europe and Asia are not all they appear to be either, with multiple layers of deception gradually unpeeled as this eight-episode thriller teases the viewer into a mindbending genre mash-up.

Difficult to say more without getting all spoilery on you, but suffice to say this show will take you on a more far-reaching voyage than you bargained for. It’s on Netflix – and if you enjoyed Dark, brought to you by the same creators, you will love 1899. The shows might actually be related, viewers, including us, speculate. We’ll see.

The Playlist (Netflix)

This one seems to have managed to stay under the radar, but The Playlist, reviewed here by Cybernews, is a well-cooked origin story of Spotify, the most popular music-streaming service out there.

It really is safe to say that Spotify and its co-founder Daniel Ek, revolutionized the music industry for good. Sure, people still buy CDs, but these are mostly collector’s items now. People still download songs and albums illegally, but the scale is surely not industrial anymore.

The Playlist series is a tale of how it all began. Yes, it’s a story, a fictionalized account, not a documentary, but neither is it a shiny in-house production.

The show is based on a book by two Swedish business reporters and talks of both the extreme convenience of Spotify and the fact that it’s tremendously difficult for artists to make money on the platform.

The Peripheral (Prime Video)

Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral stars Chloe Grace Moretz and depicts life in 2099 when people use virtual-reality headsets to travel back in time. Sounds dystopian but the plot of the show is not so far fetched, especially when artificial intelligence is making such huge strides now.

As is the case with most TV shows where the plot is fast yet complicated, you’ve got to watch with your other devices far away – scrolling through a few minutes of an episode might actually leave you in the dark about what’s going on, or, in this case, when.

On the other hand, the series, based on a William Gibson novel of the same name, is still beautifully filmed and satisfying. So our advice is also to immerse in it even if you have no idea what’s actually happening.

WeCrashed (Apple TV+)

WeCrashed, premiered this year on Apple TV+, tells us about the failings of Adam Neumann’s company WeWork, and it’s impossible to be both amazed by the performance of Jared Leto and feel a certain amount of Schadenfreude at the spectacular way Neumann failed.

It’s a sort of a rags to riches and back to rags story – what’s not to like? WeWork, the property rental company, still exists but Neumann and his wife Rebekah are not at the helm anymore, as investors pressured the toxic pair out.

Again, WeCrashed is not a documentary, nor is it strictly a tech TV series. But the way it tells a tale of an overly ambitious unicorn is convincing – even if it’s still difficult to understand how WeWork came to be valued at $47 billion at its peak, or why its value suddenly dropped to a mere $10 billion when someone decided to check out some actual documentation.