Best TV Shows of 2025 So Far

Survive till ‘25. This was the watchword for Hollywood last year, repeated like a mantra at all levels of the industry, from studio execs to below-the-line crew members. But the strikes of 2023 that delayed releases slated for 2024 were never the only ills plaguing the entertainment sector. So it isn’t surprising that the reality within the business hasn’t quite lived up to the slogan.

Still, the outlook for viewers has genuinely improved since this time last year, when beloved shows were just going back into production. Now, they’ve returned. The highlights of 2025 so far have included long-awaited new seasons of prestige TV phenomena like Severance and The White Lotus. Even more heartening has been the profusion of wonderful new shows, from star-studded slam dunks The Studio, The Pitt, and Dying for Sex to the surprise smash Adolescence.

Adolescence is, in many ways, this year’s Baby Reindeer: a sleeper-hit British Netflix miniseries that started an overdue, international conversation about masculinity and its discontents. But rather than a semi-autobiographical—and intensely personal—black comedy like creator-star Richard Gadd’s Reindeer, Adolescence is a harrowing drama about the effects of incel culture and the misogynistic manosphere on kids who can’t even imagine growing up without social media. In just four episodes that unfold not just in real time, but also as elegantly executed single shots, co-creators Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne relate the tragedy of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), arrested for the murder of a female classmate. That he did kill her is established early on; the question is, why? The standout hour puts Jamie in conversation with a psychologist (Erin Doherty) who gradually untangles the mess of influences that turned a seemingly normal middle schooler violent. Cooper, Doherty, and Graham, who plays Jamie’s guilt-stricken father, are all phenomenal. It’s no surprise, either, to see the team behind this show kind of taking over TV in 2025. Already this year, Thorne has released two other moving social dramas in the U.S., Toxic Town on Netflix and Best Interests on Acorn. Graham and Doherty, meanwhile, can be seen in Hulu’s Victorian crime series A Thousand Blows.

If it wasn’t based on a true story turned podcast, the premise of Dying for Sex might sound so far-fetched as to be offensive. Diagnosed with terminal cancer at 40, Molly (Michelle Williams) dumps her condescending husband (Jay Duplass), recruits her chaotic best friend (Jenny Slate) as her caretaker, and embarks upon a sexual odyssey to compensate for a lifetime of trauma and repression. Specifically, while undergoing invasive treatments, she exerts control over her circumstances by exploring domination. From consensual crotch-kicking to hospice hallucinations, Dying for Sex never encounters a there where it’s too timid to go. And it’s almost never less than believable, thanks to its grounding in an ordinary person’s extraordinary last days; Williams and Slate’s electric portrayal of a bond that is the most important relationship in both women’s lives; and the balance co-creators Kim Rosenstock and Liz Meriwether strike between humor, heat, and brutal honesty about the universal experience that is death. 

Judy Blume’s Forever, with its frank depictions of teen sex and detailed account of a visit to Planned Parenthood, has been in the cross-hairs of uptight adults since its publication in 1975. But Blume’s empathetic yet clear-eyed portrait of first love became a YA classic anyway. Now creator Mara Brock Akil has updated it for a tech-saturated 21st century, in a remarkable adaptation that resituates what its white, suburban story among Black teens in L.A. The central couple, Lovie Simone’s ambitious, working-class Keisha and Justin, a wealthy but lost prep schooler played by Michael Cooper Jr., feel more vivid and specific than the original characters. In a choice that ensures the show resonates with viewers of all ages, Forever also spends time with their wise, loving, inevitably imperfect parents. What Brock Akil and her phenomenal cast preserve from the novel are its most timeless themes—the ecstasy of new romance, the unpredictable nature of youth, the expanded perspective that can only come from experience.

In 2022, when Netflix unveiled the first season of Mo Amer and Ramy Youssef’s comedy series based on Amer’s experiences as a Palestinian refugee in Texas, Oct. 7 was just another date. But by the time Mo returned for its second season, this past January, the massacre Hamas committed on Israeli soil on that day in 2023 had catalyzed a war that has decimated Gaza. As one of vanishingly few Palestinian American voices in Hollywood, Amer might have devoted what would, unfortunately, be his show’s final season to current events. Instead, he confined the story of his alter ego Mo Najjar’s family to the months leading up to Oct. 7, opening with a Mexican detour that connected Mo’s predicament to that of all immigrants, continuing through the Najjars’ Kafkaesque quest for citizenship, and concluding with the their picturesque but by no means carefree visit to a homeland they hadn’t seen in decades. By turns hilarious, horrifying, and sublime, Mo broadens horizons by eschewing polemic in favor of conversation.

Arriving at a fallow moment on the calendar, propelled by a wave of nostalgia for ’90s network television, The Pitt hooked viewers with the promise of ER star Noah Wyle’s return to the emergency room, in a new medical drama conceived by that show’s producers. That was hardly all the series had to offer, though. An hour-by-hour chronicle of a single shift at a busy Pittsburgh trauma center, the first season surveyed the dire state of public health in America, earning praise from the medical community by highlighting challenges hospital workers routinely face that are rarely represented in TV’s many inferior doctor shows. It gave us wonderful characters, from Wyle as a hypercompetent attending physician who is quietly suffering to Taylor Dearden as an empathetic young resident, in a singular performance that resonated with neurodivergent viewers. At its most ambitious, The Pitt pressed its stethoscope to the heart of a nation that, in its many crises, resembles nothing so much as an overcrowded emergency room.  

Shakespeare may have popularized the idea that life is a performance, but comedian-auteur Nathan Fielder has pushed it to an extreme in The Rehearsal, a reality comedy premised on the assumption that any human pursuit can be improved through practice. While the show’s first season rearranged brains with Fielder’s increasingly introspective attempt to help a woman rehearse for motherhood, Season 2 has focused on the creator’s own, weirdly timely obsession with aviation safety. The big idea—one less mind-exploding than its predecessor but equally engaging—is that open communication between a plane’s captain and first officer would prevent crashes. But the digressions, from a psychological profile of hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to Fielder’s brilliant response to censorship, are at least as funny and fruitful. I won’t spoil the finale for those who’ve yet to see it; suffice to say the season sticks the landing. 

The three-year interval between the first and second seasons of Severance, accompanied by reports of a writing and production process plagued by “panic” over fans’ high expectations, didn’t seem to bode well for Apple’s hit sci-fi thriller. But creator Dan Erickson, director-executive producer Ben Stiller, and their note-perfect cast managed to overcome those anxieties in a new batch of episodes that rivaled Season 1 without repeating it. Set amid employees of a dystopian megacorp called Lumon who’ve had their consciousnesses consensually “severed”—creating one “innie” self for work and one off-the-clock “outie”—originally presented as a melancholy satire of office culture. This season, however, deepened the show’s philosophical undertones, using the love triangle that formed between protagonist Mark (Adam Scott), his innie’s soulmate Helly (Britt Lower), and his outie’s long-lost wife (Dichen Lachman), as well as the romantic lives of supporting characters, to raise fascinating questions about the nature of selfhood.  

The year’s best new comedy is Seth Rogen’s all-star sendup of the film industry ca. 2025, a business beset by AI anxiety, labor unrest, and a pandemic-related cinema apocalypse, whose only formula for success seems to be convincing high-minded auteurs to make movies tied to brands beloved by children. The Studio, which casts Rogen as a well-meaning but deeply insecure executive who’s suddenly promoted to studio head, isn’t exactly a revolutionary idea. In fact, it pays homage to predecessors like Robert Altman’s The Player. What the show brings to the genre—and what makes each kinetic half-hour of its first season so much fun to watch—is a fierce love of movies that comes through in, for example, an extended homage to Chinatown and such stylistic flexes as a single-shot episode devoted to filming a single-shot scene. A cast that includes Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, and a mess of A-list guest stars appearing as themselves (Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Steve Buscemi, Greta Lee, Ron Howard, Anthony Mackie, Olivia Wilde, etc. etc. ) doesn’t hurt, either. 

In its long-awaited third season, Mike White’s murderous high-end tourism satire was bigger, crazier—and, ultimately, more divisive than ever before. Some complained about the slow pace or the vaguely sketched Thai characters; others got the ick from that excruciating incest subplot. Fair enough. Even I wasn’t fully satisfied with the finale, which erred toward predictability in some places and was riddled with holes in others. And yet! White’s interrogation of how Eastern spirituality is instrumentalized by soul-sick Westerners succeeded in its wildest provocations. Also, I still can’t think of another show that so thrillingly builds tension and explodes pieties purely through piercing dialogue exchanged by ideally cast actors. (This season’s MVP list was long: Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood, Parker Posey, Carrie Coon, Jason Isaacs, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Rockwell in an iconic surprise guest arc, returning favorite Natasha Rothwell.) Nor, in a post-Succession world, can I name a show that’s more fun to pick apart on a weekly basis. So, is The White Lotus really past its prime? As a poet once said: Piper, NO!

It’s probably an indictment on all of us—Hollywood, critics, the viewing public—that one of the greatest actors in the English-speaking world (Mark Rylance) can reprise his riveting portrayal of a singular statesman (Thomas Cromwell) in the long-awaited sequel to a masterly adaptation (Wolf Hall) of the late Hilary Mantel’s marvel of historical fiction… and we’re too busy praising The Last of Us to notice. But I’m not here to scold. Rather, take this as a reminder that it’s not too late to dive into the excellent The Mirror and the Light, which revisits the Cromwell saga as the once-ascendant advisor to Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) discovers that he, too, is vulnerable to the tyrant’s whims. Unshowy direction brings language and performances to the forefront, as Rylance’s increasingly lonely, doleful tactician keeps reliving the day he delivered Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy) to her death and is haunted by the ghost of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce). Though set in the 16th century, the series’ bleak observations about elitism, integrity, and the consequences when flawed people wield absolute power feel remarkably timely.