The best TV shows of 2025

It’s the end of the year, which means it’s time to look back at some of 2025’s small-screen highlights. Despite evidence of the persistent influence of algorithms on flattening content into cookie-cutter imitations, there were several smart, provocative and original shows.

Adolescence — Netflix

Co-created by star Stephen Graham and writer Jack Thorne, this hard-hitting social realist drama about the devastating effects of the manosphere on young men sparked a public debate in the UK that reached the hallowed halls of parliament. It was filmed by director Philip Barantini so that each episode consisted of a single shot, driving home the atmosphere of confusion. The powerful story about a young teen arrested for the murder of a classmate and the effects of this on his family and community brought home the real threat toxic masculinity poses to society in the digital era.

Andor Season 2 — Disney Plus

Forced by circumstances and expense to change his original idea of having each season equate to one year in storytime, creator and director Tony Gilroy packed everything he wanted to say about fascism, rebellion and power into the second season of his Star Wars Universe prequel show to the film Rogue One. Starring Diego Luna as smuggler turned freedom fighter Cassian Andor, it’s a sci-fi franchise show that offers plenty of smart ideas about the options open to those who find themselves hopeless in the face of the power of the machine but still determined to fight back.

The Studio — Apple TV+

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s satire of modern Hollywood proved to be a screwball, laugh-a-minute rollercoaster ride featuring cameos from some of the industry’s biggest stars and packed with neat visual and stylistic call-backs that pay tribute to the long history of Tinsel Town. A worthy successor to Robert Altman’s seminal 1990s’ industry takedown The Player for an era when desperate attempts to make films out of any intellectual property Hollywood can think of and data and algorithms are the only measures of success.

Pluribus – Apple TV+

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan kept the action in New Mexico and reteamed with Better Call Saul star Rhea Seehorn, but there’s very little else that his new dystopian sci-fi creation has in common with the universe that made his name. In a world where visitors from the far reaches of the galaxy have created a utopia in which love, co-existence and friendliness are the new normal, Seehorn’s cynical romance author is on a mission to save the world from happiness in one of the year’s most original and imaginative shows.

The Rehearsal Season 2 — Showmax

Nathan Fielder returned to the uniquely uncomfortable area that his previous shows have occupied between reality and meta-comedy for a second season that managed to push the boundaries even further in the comedian’s search for ultimate cringe. The lengths to which he went to achieve this are still unbelievable, and the climax of the season offered one of the year’s most stress-inducing episodes of pure unbelievable madness.

Get Millie Black — Showmax

Booker Prize winner Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of his novel about a former Scotland Yard detective who returns home to her native Jamaica only to find herself at the centre of a criminal conspiracy that spans both countries. The mystery doesn’t rewrite the rulebook, but what makes the show is James’s feeling for the people, landscape and social relationships of Jamaica, and star Tamara Lawrance’s performance as the eponymous heroine.

Asura — Netflix

Created and directed by Palme D’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda, a filmmaker who many have hailed as the modern heir to Japanese legend Yasujiro Ozu, this visually lush, quietly observed and delicate examination of family tension dropped to little fanfare on Netflix in January. Starring some of the biggest names in Japanese cinema, it’s a moving drama set over a few months in 1979 about what happens to four sisters after they learn that their father has had an affair.

The Pitt — Showmax

The tension never let up in creator R Scott Gemmill’s smart, engaging rejigging of the traditional ER medical genre. Set in the emergency room of a busy Pittsburgh hospital, each episode follows the drama of one hour of a shift on a day that goes from mad to manic as pressure builds towards an exhausting finale that will test the limits of its various characters, led by ER alum Noah Wyle as The Pitt’s senior medical adviser, whose efficient façade finally crumbles in the face of the trauma he’s carrying from a job that never ends.

Severance Season 2 — Apple TV+

Fans of Ben Stiller’s absurdist and eerie sci-fi dystopian workplace drama had to wait three years for its return, but as this season demonstrated, the wait was more than worth it. The show managed to make its puzzling mystery even more confounding while offering expansions of its characters’ stories. And all without losing sight of the strange Lynchian situations that have made it one of recent television’s most original and weird creations.

Death By Lightning — Netflix

You wouldn’t think that a period historical drama about a mostly forgotten 19th century US president and the obsessive nutter who shot him would make for prestige television. Creator Mike Makowsky’s taut and excellently cast series about reluctant reformer and 20th US president James Garfield (Michael Shannon) and psychologically disturbed admirer turned assassin Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) offered some of the year’s most prescient commentary on the unhinged nature of Republican politics, 150 years before Donald Trump.