The Best Shows of 2025
The shows we all loved this year
Television these days feels like an ever-growing group chat. There are too many shows, too many platforms, too much content. The industry is bloated, AI is taking over, and brain rot is killing us into watching Friends again.
And yet.
Despite everything—despite consolidation panic, AI anxiety, attention spans fried beyond repair—this was a quietly exceptional year for television. Not because it reinvented the medium, but because the best shows remembered what TV does better than anything else: sustained intimacy.
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What connected the year’s best work wasn’t genre or platform, but a shared seriousness of intent. These were stories about institutions under pressure—work, family, law enforcement, healthcare, entertainment—and the people warped by them. They didn’t rush to reassure. They lingered in the mess. Some were grim. Some were funny. A few managed to be both in the same breath.
Best TV Shows of 2025
Here are the shows that made the year worth enduring. Here are the shows that mattered in 2025.
The Pitt
Set across one brutal 15-hour shift, The Pitt strips away the romance of hospital television and replaces it with exhaustion, triage, and moral fatigue. Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby anchors the series, but this is an ensemble triumph—one that understands healthcare as a system stretched to its breaking point post-COVID.
The real-time structure isn’t a gimmick; it’s a pressure cooker. By the time the mass-shooting victims arrive, the show has already drained you. That’s the point.
Severance (Season 2)
Season one of Severance sold itself on a killer premise. Season two earned its greatness by refusing to coast on it. What Dan Erickson’s series becomes here is less a workplace satire and more a grief machine—about what we amputate from ourselves just to survive. Adam Scott’s Mark isn’t just mourning anymore. Britt Lower’s Helly moves from rebellion to reckoning. John Turturro and Christopher Walken’s strange, tender love story becomes the show’s emotional north star.
This season’s quiet achievement is its refusal to answer the “big questions” too quickly. Instead, it deepens the horror of corporate dehumanisation through character—through rage, longing, and the creeping sense that work doesn’t just steal your time, it steals your interior life. And through it all, the show keeps whispering its bleak thesis: yes, work does suck—but not in the way you think.
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Adolescence
It’s rare that a show detonates both emotionally and politically, but Adolescence managed exactly that—without grandstanding or easy villains. Jack Thorne and Philip Barantini’s four-part, single-take drama about a 13-year-old accused of murder is devastating precisely because it refuses sensationalism. There’s no procedural comfort, no tidy moral framing. Just a slow, suffocating immersion into how online masculinity, alienation, and shame metastasise.
Owen Cooper’s performance is the kind that rewires how we talk about child actors. Stephen Graham, as ever, is quietly shattering. But the show’s real weapon is form: the one-shot structure doesn’t let you look away. You’re complicit. You’re trapped. You’re forced to watch the consequences unfold in real time. That Adolescence sparked parliamentary debate in the UK feels appropriate.
Task
Brad Ingelsby’s return to the working-class moral wastelands of Pennsylvania feels less like a sequel to Mare of Easttown and more like a descent further underground. Mark Ruffalo’s Tom Brandis is a man walking through life as if he’s already been punished, leading a doomed task force through the fentanyl economy’s human wreckage.
But Task belongs to Tom Pelphrey. His Robbie Prendergrast is one of the year’s most searing performances—raw, unpredictable, and terrifying in its emotional nakedness. The show offers no relief, no gallows humour, no release valve. It just keeps asking what happens when institutions fail so completely that survival itself becomes a moral compromise.
Pluribus
Pluribus is a show that dares you to be patient. Rhea Seehorn’s Carol—immune to an alien invasion that turns humanity into a contented hive mind—wanders through a world that insists on pleasing her while fundamentally misunderstanding her. It’s funny, eerie, and deeply lonely television.
Gilligan is interested in erosion—of autonomy, of dissent, of solitude. The show’s slow pace is defiant. It won’t be for everyone, but if you love it you love it.
Paatal Lok (Season 2)
Season two drags Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary out of Delhi and into Nagaland, expanding the show’s moral geography without losing its grit. Jaideep Ahlawat continues to play Hathiram as a man perpetually exhausted by righteousness—a cop whose decency feels like a liability rather than a virtue.
The season is dense, occasionally overstuffed, and uninterested in spoon-feeding. Political violence, insurgency, business interests, and state power blur into each other.
The Studio
Seth Rogen’s industry satire is far smarter than its cameos suggest. Yes, it’s stuffed with celebrity insanity. But beneath the slapstick is a surprisingly affectionate portrait of creative compromise and institutional chaos.
What makes The Studio sing is its refusal to sneer. It understands the absurdity of Hollywood without flattening it into contempt. And it never forgets that comedy, at its best, is still craft.
The Beast in Me
Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys elevate what could’ve been a disposable thriller into something far more unsettling. The Beast in Me understands that evil isn’t just monstrous—it’s seductive and banal.
Most thrillers collapse under their own mystery. This one tightens its grip as it goes, building toward a finale that earns its violence rather than exploiting it. Danes’ performance is among her best.
Black Warrant
Vikramaditya Motwane’s prison drama understands that the most terrifying systems don’t need villains—they just need procedures. Set inside Tihar Jail, Black Warrant avoids sensationalism, instead fixating on the negotiated ethics of survival within a corrupt structure.
Zahan Kapoor delivers a performance defined by restraint, playing a man whose idealism is slowly eroded by proximity to power. The series’ greatest strength is its refusal to moralise loudly. Brutality is often off-screen. Corruption is casual. Violence is administrative.
Dept. Q
Relocating a Danish crime series to Edinburgh could’ve resulted in another moody procedural clone. Instead, Dept. Q thrives on tonal precision. The cases are grim, but the pleasure lies in the interpersonal abrasion—particularly between the abrasive Carl Morck and Kelly Macdonald’s therapist.
Hacks (Season 4)
Season four isn’t the show’s peak, but its very existence now carries a strange irony. A series about an ageing comic fighting irrelevance risks becoming background noise itself. Jean Smart, however, refuses that fate. Her Deborah Vance remains one of television’s great ego portraits—vain, brilliant, cruel, vulnerable, often all at once.
What keeps Hacks vital is its understanding of ambition as dependency. Deborah and Ava don’t just need each other professionally—they need each other to stay legible to themselves. Frenemy dynamics rarely sustain this long without collapsing into caricature.
The White Lotus (Season 3)
Thailand gave The White Lotus a different texture: sweatier, stranger, and more openly deranged. Mike White leans harder into excess this time—viral moments, shock reveals, performances pitched to the internet’s attention span.
And yet, even when it wobbles, the show remains structurally sound. Class anxiety, sexual power, Western entitlement—all still skewered with a sneer sharp enough to draw blood. Parker Posey alone justifies the trip.
All Her Fault
There’s a particular kind of terror that good thrillers understand: the kind that begins in the mundane. A playdate. A front door. A woman who says she’s never seen your child. All Her Fault wastes no time detonating that fear—and then, smartly, refuses to let it stay simple. Sarah Snook is the gravitational force here. What elevates the show beyond genre mechanics is Dakota Fanning. Her Jenny—a working mother drowning in guilt, obligation, and quiet self-loathing—adds a second, deeply human axis to the story.
Ba**ds of Bollywood
Aryan Khan’s series is uneven, but it’s also more self-aware than expected. The cameos are inevitable; the pleasure lies in watching insiders caricature themselves without completely neutering the critique. When the show leans into satire—blind items, gym-pap culture, inherited power—it finds its bite.